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108Three principles of rationalismEuropean Journal of Philosophy 10 (3). 2002.It is just over fifty years since the publication of Quine’s ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’. That paper expresses a broad vision of the system of relations between meaning, experience, and the rational formation of belief. The deepest challenges the paper poses come not from the detailed argument of its first four sections – formidable though that is – but from the visionary material in its last two sections.1 It is this visionary material that is likely to force the reader to revise, to deepen, or …Read more
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107Discussion of Christopher Peacocke’s A Study of Concepts (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 56 (2): 425. 1996.Christopher Peacocke’s A Study of Concepts is a dense and rewarding work. Each chapter raises many issues for discussion. I know three different people who are writing reviews of the volume. It testifies to the depth of Peacocke’s book that each reviewer is focusing on a quite different set of topics.
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105Possession conditions: A focal point for theories of conceptsMind and Language 4 (1-2): 51-56. 1989.
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105Conceiving of Conscious StatesIn J. Ellis & D. Guevara (eds.), Wittgenstein and the Philosophy of Mind, Oxford University Press. 2012.For a wide range of concepts, a thinker’s understanding of what it is for a thing to fall under the concept plausibly involves knowledge of an identity. It involves knowledge that the thing has to have the same property as is exemplified in instantiation of the concept in some distinguished, basic instance. This paper addresses the question: can we apply this general model of the role of identity in understanding to the case of subjective, conscious states? In particular, can we explain our unde…Read more
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102Holistic Explanation: Action, Space, InterpretationClarendon Press. 1979.INTRODUCTION The philosophy of action and the philosophy of space and time may well seem to be unconnected areas. I will argue that in each of these areas ...
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100The limits of intelligibility: A post-verificationist proposalPhilosophical Review 97 (4): 463-496. 1988.
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95Experiencing Metaphorically-As in Music Perception: Clarifications and Commitments: SymposiumBritish Journal of Aesthetics 49 (3): 299-306. 2009.
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89Music and Experiencing Metaphorically-As: Further Delineation: ArticlesBritish Journal of Aesthetics 50 (2): 189-191. 2010.(No abstract is available for this citation)
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86Perception, Biology, Action, and KnowledgePhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 88 (2): 477-484. 2014.
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81JSTOR: The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 98, No. 5 (May, 2001), pp. 239-264Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.T n he question posed in my title is one that has been vigorously debated in philosophy for almost twenty years now. In one form or another, the idea that perceptual experience has a content that is nonconceptual is found in the writings of, among others, Jose Bermuidez, ... \n
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78Mental action and self-awareness : epistemologyIn Lucy O'Brien & Matthew Soteriou (eds.), Mental actions, Oxford University Press. 2009.We often know what we are judging, what we are deciding, what problem we are trying to solve. We know not only the contents of our judgements, decidings and tryings; we also know that it is judgement, decision and attempted problem-solving in which we are engaged. How do we know these things?
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77First person illusions: Are they Descartes', or Kant's?Philosophical Perspectives 26 (1): 247-275. 2012.
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75The Mirror of the World: Subjects, Consciousness, and Self-ConsciousnessOxford University Press. 2014.Christopher Peacocke presents a new theory of subjects of consciousness, together with a theory of the nature of first person representation. He identifies three sorts of self-consciousness--perspectival, reflective, and interpersonal--and argues that they are key to explaining features of our knowledge, social relations, and emotional lives
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74Précis of A Study of Concepts (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 56 (2): 407. 1996.The principal thesis of A Study of Concepts is that a concept is individuated by its possession condition. Concepts are here understood to be sliced as finely as epistemic possibility. So now and 6 o’clock are different concepts, even if, in context, they pick out the same time; likewise for the observational concept circular and the complex concept locus of coplanar points equidistant from a given point. In the simplest cases, a possession condition is stated by giving a true, individuating sta…Read more
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71The Distinctive Character of Musical ExperienceBritish Journal of Aesthetics 60 (2): 183-197. 2020.The goal of this paper is to use the dual resources of the contemporary theory of intentional content and the notion of experiencing something metaphorically as something else, which I have defended in my earlier work, to explain the distinctive character of musical experience. These resources are used to explain Felix Mendelssohn’s point that emotional content in music can be more specific than anything capturable in language; to give an account of the role of metaphor in musical experience tha…Read more
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70What is involved in the primacy of metaphysics?Philosophical Studies 178 (8): 2745-2757. 2020.The notion of explanatory priority is clarified. For A to be explanatory prior to B is for the correct account of the individuation of B to mention A, but not conversely. Exploring the relations of explanatory priority between entities does not involve the impossible enterprise of explaining why individuating conditions are as they are. Use-theoretic accounts of meaning and content are consistent with the claims of The Primacy of Metaphysics if they essentially involve a reference relation; and …Read more
Christopher Peacocke
Columbia University
Institute of Philosophy, School of Advanced Study, University of London
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Institute of Philosophy, School of Advanced Study, University of LondonOther (Part-time)
New York City, New York, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics and Epistemology |
Science, Logic, and Mathematics |
Other Academic Areas |