University of California, Berkeley
Department of Philosophy
PhD, 2006
Cambridge, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
  • Perception: The Basics
    Routledge. 2024.
    This book combines approaches from philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience in the study of perception. In addition to appealing to readers from all three of these disciplines, Perception: The Basics is a perfect introduction for students and general readers. Its interdisciplinary coverage of all aspects of perception does not require familiarity with either abstract philosophical concepts or neuroscientific knowledge. Besides addressing the classic questions of how perception works, the book hi…Read more
  •  19
    This book is about mental imagery and the important work it does in our mental life. It plays a crucial role in the vast majority of our perceptual episodes. It also helps us understand many of the most puzzling features of perception (like the way it is influenced in a top-down manner and the way different sense-modalities interact). But mental imagery also plays a very important role in emotions, action execution and even in our desires. In sum, there are very few mental phenomena that mental …Read more
  •  7
    Entity Realism About Mental Representations
    Erkenntnis 87 (1): 75-91. 2022.
    The concept of mental representation has long been considered to be central concept of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. But not everyone agrees. Neo-behaviorists aim to explain the mind (or some subset thereof) without positing any representations. My aim here is not to assess the merits and demerits of neo-behaviorism, but to take their challenge seriously and ask the question: What justifies the attribution of representations to an agent? Both representationalists and neo-behaviorists…Read more
  •  107
    Against imagination
    In Jonathan Cohen & Brian McLaughlin (eds.), Contemporary Debates in the Philosophy of Mind (2nd Edition), Blackwell. forthcoming.
    The term ‘imagination’ may seem harmless. We talk about imagination all the time. Nonetheless, I will argue that we should treat it with suspicion. More precisely, I will argue that the explanatory power of the concept of imagination can be fully captured by a scientifically more respectable and more powerful concept, namely, the concept of mental imagery.
  •  2
    Inflected and Uninflected Experience of Pictures
    In Catharine Abell & Katerina Bantinaki (eds.), Philosophical Perspectives on Depiction, Oxford University Press. 2010.
  •  75
    Three books about the philosophy of Marcel Proust
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. forthcoming.
    Many philosophers got pushed into philosophy not because they read some piece of especially impressive philosophical work but because their philosophical c.
  • Properties in perception
    In A. R. J. Fisher & Anna-Sofia Maurin (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Properties, Routledge. 2024.
  •  40
    Franz Boas and the Primacy of Form
    British Journal of Aesthetics 64 (3): 381-395. 2024.
    There is systematic epistemic asymmetry between different centers of art production: we know far more about some (e.g. fifteenth-century Italian paintings) than about others (e.g. fifteenth-century Inca textiles). As long as we are focusing on the social context of the artworks or the artist’s intention, this epistemic asymmetry remains, given that we have vastly more information about the social context of the artworks or the artist’s intention when it comes to ‘Western’ art—again, because of t…Read more
  • Everyday aesthetic injustice
    In Dominic Lopes, Samantha Matherne, Mohan Matthen & Bence Nanay (eds.), The Geography of Taste, Oxford University Press. 2024.
  •  1242
    The Geography of Taste
    with Dominic Lopes, Samantha Matherne, and Mohan Matthen
    Oxford University Press. 2024.
    Aesthetic preferences and practices vary widely between individuals and between cultures. How should aesthetics proceed if we take this fact of aesthetic diversity, rather than the presumption of aesthetic universality, as our starting point? How should we theorize the cultural origins and cultural basis of aesthetic diversity? How should we think about the value and normativity of aesthetic diversity? In an effort to model what the turn toward diversity might look like in aesthetic inquiry, eac…Read more
  •  101
    Aesthetic Experience as Interaction
    Journal of the American Philosophical Association 1-13. forthcoming.
    The aim of this article is to argue that what is distinctive about aesthetic experiences has to do with what we do -- not with our perception or evaluation, but with our action and, more precisely, with our interaction with whatever we are aesthetically engaging with. This view goes against the mainstream inasmuch as aesthetic engagement is widely held to be special precisely because it is detached from the sphere of the practical. I argue that taking the interactive nature of aesthetic experien…Read more
  •  16
    Perception
    with Sam Rose
    In Lydia Goehr & Jonathan Gilmore (eds.), A Companion to Arthur C. Danto, Wiley. 2021.
    Both Arthur Danto and Jerry Fodor are modularist: they both think that perception is an encapsulated process that is in no way influenced by any kind of non‐perceptual processing. Danto's aesthetics can in part be separated out from his modularism, leading us to draw slightly different but arguably even more interesting conclusions from famous thought experiments such as the Gallery of Indiscernibles. Danto firmly rejects this post‐Wittgensteinian turn, offering evidence for his position that pe…Read more
  •  52
    We argue that the causal theory of memory and the simulation theory of memory are not as straightforwardly incompatible as they are usually taken to be. Following a brief review of the theories, we describe alternative normative and descriptive perspectives on memory, arguing that the causal theory aligns better with the normative perspective and the simulation theory with the descriptive perspective. Taking explanatory contextualism about perception as our starting point, we then develop a form…Read more
  •  426
    The selective advantage of representing correctly
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 107 (3): 706-717. 2023.
    Here is a widespread but controversial idea: those animals who represent correctly are likely to be selected over those who misrepresent. While various versions of this claim have been traditionally endorsed by the vast majority of philosophers of mind, recently, it has been argued that this is just plainly wrong. My aim in this paper is to argue for an intermediate position: that the correctness of some but not all representations is indeed selectively advantageous. It is selectively advantageo…Read more
  •  25
    Frissons in Dance
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 81 (1): 15-23. 2023.
    Musical frissons (or chills) have been at the forefront of both philosophical and psychological research on audience responses to music. The aim of this article is to argue that frissons also play an important role in the experience of dance performances. Following Jerrold Levinson’s distinction between sound-quality frissons and sound-structure frissons, the article zooms in on the concept of conflict-induced frissons, which feature prominently in a variety of art forms besides music, from film…Read more
  •  627
    Many-to-One Intentionalism
    Journal of Philosophy 121 (2): 89-107. 2024.
    Intentionalism is the view that perceptual phenomenology depends on perceptual content. The aim of this paper is to make explicit an ambiguity in usual formulations of intentionalism, and to argue in favor of one way to disambiguate it. It concerns whether perceptual phenomenology depends on the content of one and only one representation (often construed as being identical to a certain perceptual experience), or instead depends on a collection of many different representations throughout the per…Read more
  •  540
    Against the very idea of a perceptual belief
    Analytic Philosophy 64 (2): 93-105. 2023.
    The aim of this paper is to argue that there is no unproblematic way of delineating perceptual beliefs from non-perceptual beliefs. The concept of perceptual belief is one of the central concepts not only of philosophy of perception but also of epistemology in a broad foundationalist tradition. Philosophers of perception talk about perceptual belief as the interface between perception and cognition and foundationalist epistemologists understand perceptual justification as a relation between perc…Read more
  •  132
    What do we see in pictures? The sensory individuals of picture perception
    Philosophical Studies 179 (12): 3729-3746. 2022.
    When I am looking at an apple, I perceptually attribute certain properties to certain entities. Two questions arise: what are these entities (what is it that I perceptually represent as having properties) and what are these properties (what properties I perceive this entity as having)? This paper is about the former, less widely explored, question: what does our perceptual system attribute properties to? In other words, what are these ‘sensory individuals’. There have been important debates in p…Read more
  •  30
    Is Psychology Relevant to Aesthetics? A Symposium
    Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics 56 (1): 87. 2020.
  •  715
    Against imagination
    In Jonathan Cohen & Brian McLaughlin (eds.), Contemporary Debates in the Philosophy of Mind (2nd Edition), Blackwell. forthcoming.
    The term ‘imagination’ may seem harmless. We talk about imagination all the time. Nonetheless, I will argue that we should treat it with suspicion. More precisely, I will argue that the explanatory power of the concept of imagination can be fully captured by a scientifically more respectable and more powerful concept, namely, the concept of mental imagery.
  •  38
    Boundary extension as mental imagery
    Analysis 81 (4): 647-656. 2022.
    When we remember a scene, the scene’s boundaries are wider than the boundaries of the scene we saw. This phenomenon is called boundary extension. The most important philosophical question about boundary extension is whether it is a form of perceptual adjustment or adjustment during memory encoding. The aim of this paper is to propose a third explanatory scheme, according to which the extended boundary of the original scene is represented by means of mental imagery. And given the similarities bet…Read more
  •  73
    Offline perception
    with Peter Fazekas and Joel Pearson
    Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 376 (1817). 2021.
    Experiences that are self-generated and independent of sensory stimulations permeate our whole life. This theme issue examines their similarities and differences, systematizes the literature from an integrative perspective, critically discusses state-of-the-art empirical findings and proposes new theoretical approaches. The aim of the theme issue is to foster interaction between the different disciplines and research directions involved and to explore the prospects of a unificatory account of of…Read more
  •  832
    This chapter explores insights concerning the relations among imagination, imagined selves, and knowledge of one’s own self that are to be found in Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet. The insights are explored via close reading of the text and comparison with contemporaries of Pessoa. First, a tempting account of the importance of imagination in The Book of Disquiet is set out. On this reading, Pessoa is immersed in miasmatic boredom, but able to temporarily rise above it through the restora…Read more
  •  705
    Amodal completion and relationalism
    Philosophical Studies 179 (8): 2537-2551. 2022.
    Amodal completion is usually characterized as the representation of those parts of the perceived object that we get no sensory stimulation from. In the case of the visual sense modality, for example, amodal completion is the representation of occluded parts of objects we see. I argue that relationalism about perception, the view that perceptual experience is constituted by the relation to the perceived object, cannot give a coherent account of amodal completion. The relationalist has two options…Read more
  •  36
    Boundary extension as mental imagery
    Analysis 81 (3): 647-656. 2021.
    When we remember a scene, the scene’s boundaries are wider than the boundaries of the scene we saw. This phenomenon is called boundary extension. The most important philosophical question about boundary extension is whether it is a form of perceptual adjustment or adjustment during memory encoding. The aim of this paper is to propose a third explanatory scheme, according to which the extended boundary of the original scene is represented by means of mental imagery. And given the similarities bet…Read more
  •  13
    Between Fodor and Darwin
    In Judit Gervain, Gergely Csibra & Kristóf Kovács (eds.), A Life in Cognition: Studies in Cognitive Science in Honor of Csaba Pléh, Springer Verlag. pp. 175-184. 2021.
    Jerry Fodor, the long-time proponent of the Language of Thought hypothesis has published a widely condemned book at the end of his life, criticising Darwin’s theory of natural selection. It has been argued that this is not just some kind of quirk or a result of Fodor’s idiosyncratic aging process, but a direct consequence of Fodor’s general theoretical commitments. And this is where Csaba Pléh fares much better than Fodor. Pléh’s general theoretical commitments were very similar to Fodor’s inasm…Read more
  •  35
    Imagining one experience to be another
    Synthese 199 (5-6): 13977-13991. 2021.
    I can imagine a banana to be a phone receiver. I can also imagine the flapping of my arms to be flying. So it is possible to imagine one thing to be another—at least for some types of ‘things’. I will argue that although it is possible to imagine an object to be another object and it is also possible to imagine an activity to be a different activity, one cannot imagine one’s present sensory experience to be a different sensory experience with different qualitative character. This claim will have…Read more