•  50
    John Heil, Appearance in Reality (review)
    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. 2023.
    John Heil’s new book ranges over many of the major topics in metaphysics, including substance, properties, causation, space, time, parts and wholes, modality, essence, agency, and consciousness. It has interesting things to say about all of the issues it discusses, but there are three topics that are especially prominent in the book, and which help to organize the discussion. These all flow from the differences between our everyday, commonsense understanding of reality and the representations th…Read more
  •  2
    Replies to E. J. Green, Zoe Jenkin, and Jack Lyons
    Mind and Language 39 (1): 102-108. 2024.
    I argue for three claims. (1) The phenomenology of visual experience is exhausted by awareness of appearance properties (i.e., certain constantly changing characteristics of external objects that are relational and viewpoint‐dependent). (2) Cognition differs from perception in that it has a purely discursive or linguistic dimension, whereas perception is pervasively analog and iconic; but this does not determine a border between the two domains, for cognition also has a massive iconic dimension.…Read more
  •  65
    Meaning, Mind, and Knowledge
    Oxford University Press. 2014.
    This volume presents a selection of essays by the leading philosopher Christopher S. Hill. Together, they address central philosophical issues related to four key concerns: the nature of truth; the relation between experiences and brain states; the relation between experiences and representational states; and problems concerning knowledge
  •  118
    New Perspectives on Type Identity: The Mental and the Physical (edited book)
    Cambridge University Press. 2012.
    The type identity theory, according to which types of mental state are identical to types of physical state, fell out of favour for some years but is now being considered with renewed interest. Many philosophers are critically re-examining the arguments which were marshalled against it, finding in the type identity theory both resources to strengthen a comprehensive, physicalistic metaphysics and a useful tool in understanding the relationship between developments in psychology and new results i…Read more
  •  61
    Consciousness
    Cambridge University Press. 2009.
    This book presents a comprehensive theory of consciousness. The initial chapter distinguishes six main forms of consciousness and sketches an account of each one. Later chapters focus on phenomenal consciousness, consciousness of, and introspective consciousness. In discussing phenomenal consciousness, Hill develops the representational theory of mind in new directions, arguing that all awareness involves representations, even awareness of qualitative states like pain. He then uses this view to …Read more
  •  28
    Perceptual experience
    Oxford University Press. 2022.
    This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Christopher S. Hill argues that perceptual experience constitutively involves representations of worldly items, and that the relevant form of representation can be explained in broadly biological terms. He then maintains that the representational contents of perceptual exp…Read more
  •  27
    Consciousness and the Origins of Thought (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 59 (1): 273-276. 1999.
  •  1
    Goldman on Knowledge of Mind
    In Brian P. McLaughlin & Hilary Kornblith (eds.), Goldman and His Critics, Wiley. 2016.
    This chapter focuses on three parts of Goldman's work, beginning with his model of the processes that underlie ascriptions of mental states to others. It maintains that Goldman errs in ignoring the role that knowledge of testimony plays in those processes. The second topic will be the theory of introspection that Goldman developed in the early 1990s. The reader may be surprised to find that most of the author remarks are concerned with this topic, given that Goldman's views about introspection h…Read more
  •  7
    Remarks on David Papineau's Thinking about Consciousness1
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 71 (1): 147-147. 2007.
  •  110
    Reply to Alex Byrne and Fred Dretske (review)
    Philosophical Studies 161 (3): 503-511. 2012.
    Reply to Alex Byrne and Fred Dretske Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-9 DOI 10.1007/s11098-011-9814-2 Authors Christopher S. Hill, Department of Philosophy, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912, USA Journal Philosophical Studies Online ISSN 1573-0883 Print ISSN 0031-8116
  •  34
    Replies to Byrne, McGrath, and McLaughlin
    Philosophical Studies 173 (3): 861-872. 2016.
  •  27
    Remarks on David Papineau’s Thinking About Consciousness (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 71 (1). 2005.
    Thinking about Consciousness is a wonderfully clear and vigorous commen- tary on the nature of consciousness and its relationship to brain processes. It advances the contemporary discussion of a number of important issues, but it also introduces several quite valuable ideas that are independent of the con- temporary literature. Papineau has performed an important service by writing it.
  •  11
    Armchair Methods in Philosophy of Mind
    ProtoSociology 39 204-220. 2022.
    Jaegwon Kim relied principally on armchair methods in approaching problems in philosophy of mind. This paper is concerned with the nature of such methods and their prospects of success. Identifying the main armchair methods as introspection, modal reasoning involving conceivability tests, and conceptual analysis, the paper argues that insofar as the first two members of this trio aim to reveal the constitutive metaphysical natures of mental states, they are unable to reach their objective. In co…Read more
  •  41
    Appearance and reality
    Philosophical Issues 30 (1): 175-191. 2020.
    Philosophical Issues, Volume 30, Issue 1, Page 175-191, October 2020.
  •  29
    Unrevisability
    Synthese 198 (4): 3015-3031. 2019.
    Opposing Quine, I defend the view that some of the statements we accept are immune to empirical revision. My examples include instances of Schema and abbreviative definitions. I argue that it serves important cognitive purposes to hold statements of these kinds immune to revision, and that it is epistemically permissible for us to do so. At the end, I briefly consider the question of whether the rationale for these claims might be extended to show that additional statements are unrevisable.
  •  38
    Supervenience and Materialism
    Philosophical Review 107 (1): 115. 1998.
    Rowlands is concerned to explain and defend a doctrine about the relationship between mental states and physical states that he calls supervenience materialism. Very roughly speaking, this is the doctrine that it is the possession of physical properties by an object that makes for or determines the possession of mental properties by that object. In explaining this doctrine, Rowlands discusses various questions of interpretation, such as what should be meant by ‘determines’ and by ‘physical prope…Read more
  •  106
    Harman on self referential thoughts
    Philosophical Issues 16 (1): 346-357. 2006.
    I will be concerned in these pages with the views that Gilbert Harman puts forward in his immensely stimulating paper Self-Reflexive Thoughts.<sup>1</sup> Harman maintains that self referential thoughts are possible, and also that they are useful. I applaud both of these claims. An example of a self referential thought is the thought that every thought, including this present one, has a logical structure. I feel sure that this thought exists, for I have entertained it on a number of occasions. M…Read more
  •  133
    The perception of size and shape
    Philosophical Issues 18 (1): 294-315. 2008.
    No Abstract
  •  21
    The Peripheral Mind, by István Aranyosi
    Mind 124 (493): 312-317. 2015.
  •  47
    The Mysterious Flame (review)
    Philosophical Review 110 (2): 300-303. 2001.
    As the subtitle indicates, this book is concerned with the relationship between consciousness and the physical world. It recommends a novel and disturbingly pessimistic view about this topic that it calls “naturalistic mysterianism.” The view is naturalistic because it maintains that states of consciousness are reducible to physical properties of the brain. It counts as “mysterian” because it asserts that the physical properties in question are entirely beyond our ken—that they lie well beyond t…Read more
  •  36
    The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World
    Philosophical Review 110 (2): 300. 2001.
    As the subtitle indicates, this book is concerned with the relationship between consciousness and the physical world. It recommends a novel and disturbingly pessimistic view about this topic that it calls “naturalistic mysterianism.” The view is naturalistic because it maintains that states of consciousness are reducible to physical properties of the brain. It counts as “mysterian” because it asserts that the physical properties in question are entirely beyond our ken—that they lie well beyond t…Read more
  •  103
  •  6
    Précis of Thought and World: An Austere Portrayal of Truth, Reference, and Semantic Correspondence
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 72 (1): 174-181. 2006.
    Brown University.
  •  714
    There Are Fewer Things in Reality Than Are Dreamt of in Chalmers’s Philosophy (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 59 (2): 445-454. 1999.
    Chalmers’s anti-materialist argument runs as follows
  •  24
    Susanna Schellenberg on perception
    Mind and Language 37 (2): 208-218. 2022.
    Schellenberg's book The unity of perception is full of innovative ideas and challenges to preconceptions. This discussion endorses several of Schellenberg's main contentions, but it also challenges her handling of several key topics, such as hallucinations and perceptual awareness of particulars, and it expresses doubts about the informativeness of her main analytic tool, the notion of a perceptual capacity.
  •  38
    Quine
    Philosophical Review 120 (1): 117-124. 2011.
  •  103
    Perceptual Relativity
    Philosophical Topics 44 (2): 179-200. 2016.
    Visual experience is shaped by a number of factors that are independent of the external objects that we perceive—factors like lighting, angle of view, and the sensitivities of photoreceptors in the retina. This paper seeks to catalog, analyze, and explain the fluctuations in visual phenomenology that are due to such factors.
  •  79
    Précis of thought and world: An austere portrayal of truth, reference, and semantic correspondence (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 72 (1). 2006.
    Thought and World has three main concerns.1 First, it presents and defends a deflationary theory of propositional truth—that is, a deflationary theory of the concept of truth that figures in claims like the proposition that snow is white is true. I have long admired the deflationary theory of truth that Paul Horwich developed in the eighties, but I have also had substantial misgivings about that theory.2 In writing TW I was concerned to formulate an alternative view that enjoys the virtues of Ho…Read more