Christopher Peacocke

Columbia University
Institute of Philosophy, School of Advanced Study, University of London
  • Columbia University
    Department of Philosophy
    Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy
  • Institute of Philosophy, School of Advanced Study, University of London
    Other (Part-time)
University of Oxford
Faculty of Philosophy
DPhil
New York City, New York, United States of America
  •  892
    Magnitudes: Metaphysics, Explanation, and Perception
    In Danièle Moyal-Sharrock, Volker Munz & Annalisa Coliva (eds.), Mind, Language and Action: Proceedings of the 36th International Wittgenstein Symposium, De Gruyter. pp. 357-388. 2015.
    I am going to argue for a robust realism about magnitudes, as irreducible elements in our ontology. This realistic attitude, I will argue, gives a better metaphysics than the alternatives. It suggests some new options in the philosophy of science. It also provides the materials for a better account of the mind’s relation to the world, in particular its perceptual relations.
  •  604
  •  465
    Phenomenology and nonconceptual content
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 62 (3): 609-615. 2001.
    This note aims to clarify which arguments do, and which arguments do not, tell against Conceptualism, the thesis that the representational content of experience is exclusively conceptual. Contrary to Sean Kelly’s position, conceptualism has no difficulty accommodating the phenomena of color constancy and of situation-dependence. Acknowledgment of nonconceptual content is also consistent with holding that experiences have nonrepresentational subjective features. The crucial arguments against conc…Read more
  •  458
    This paper presents an account of the understanding of statements involving metaphysical modality, together with dovetailing theories of their truth conditions and epistemology. The account makes modal truth an objective matter, whilst avoiding both Lewisian modal realism and mind-dependent or expressivist treatments of the truth conditions of modal sentences. The theory proceeds by formulating constraints a world-description must meet if it is to represent a genuine possibility. Modal truth is …Read more
  •  406
    A Study of Concepts
    MIT Press. 1992.
    Philosophers from Hume, Kant, and Wittgenstein to the recent realists and antirealists have sought to answer the question, What are concepts? This book provides a detailed, systematic, and accessible introduction to an original philosophical theory of concepts that Christopher Peacocke has developed in recent years to explain facts about the nature of thought, including its systematic character, its relations to truth and reference, and its normative dimension. Particular concepts are also treat…Read more
  •  394
    Depiction
    Philosophical Review 96 (3): 383-410. 1987.
  •  386
    What is a logical constant?
    Journal of Philosophy 73 (9): 221-240. 1976.
  •  359
    The Perception of Music: Sources of Significance
    Modern Schoolman 86 (3-4): 239-260. 2009.
    We can experience music as sad, as exuberant, as sombre. We can experience it as expressing immensity, identification with the rest of humanity, or gratitude. The foundational question of what it is for music to express these or anything else is easily asked; and it has proved extraordinarily difficult to answer satisfactorily. The question of what it is for emotion or other states to be heard in music is not the causal or computational question of how it comes to be heard. It is not the questio…Read more
  •  339
    The metaphysics of concepts
    Mind 100 (399): 525-46. 1991.
  •  324
    New Essays on the A Priori (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 2000.
    A stellar line-up of leading philosophers from around the world offer new treatments of a topic which has long been central to philosophical debate, and in ...
  •  320
    Conscious attitudes, attention, and self-knowledge
    In Crispin Wright, Barry C. Smith & Cynthia Macdonald (eds.), Knowing Our Own Minds, Oxford University Press. pp. 83. 1998.
    What is involved in the consciousness of a conscious, "occurrent" propositional attitude, such as a thought, a sudden conjecture or a conscious decision? And what is the relation of such consciousness to attention? I hope the intrinsic interest of these questions provides sufficient motivation to allow me to start by addressing them. We will not have a full understanding either of consciousness in general, nor of attention in general, until we have answers to these questions. I think there are c…Read more
  •  312
    Introduction This book is about the nature of the content of psychological states. Examples of psychological states with content are: believing today is a ...
  •  301
    Nonconceptual content defended (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 58 (2): 381-388. 1998.
  •  225
    Objectivity
    Mind 118 (471): 739-769. 2009.
    Judgement, perception, and other mental states and events have a minimal objectivity in this sense: making the judgement or being in the mental state does not in general thereby make the judgement correct or make the perception veridical. I offer an explanation of this minimal objectivity by developing a form of constitutive transcendental argument. The argument appeals to the proper individuation of the content of judgements and perceptions. In the case of the conceptual content of judgements, …Read more
  •  223
    Justification, realism and the past
    Mind 114 (455): 639-670. 2005.
    This paper begins by considering Dummett's justificationist treatment of statements about the past in his book Truth and the Past (2004). Contrary to Dummett's position, there is no way of applying the intuitionistic distinction in the arithmetical case between direct and indirect methods of establishing a content to the case of past-tense statements. Attempts to do so either give the wrong truth conditions, or rely on notions not available to a justificationist position. A better, realistic tre…Read more
  •  221
    Mental Action and Self-Awareness
    In Jonathan D. Cohen & Brian P. McLaughlin (eds.), Contemporary Debates in the Philosophy of Mind, Blackwell. 2006.
    This paper is built around a single, simple idea. It is widely agreed that there is a distinctive kind of awareness each of us has of his own bodily actions. This action-awareness is different from any perceptual awareness a subject may have of his own actions; it can exist in the absence of such perceptual awareness. The single, simple idea around which this paper is built is that the distinctive awareness that subjects have of their own mental actions is a form of action-awareness. Subjects’ a…Read more
  •  213
    Sensational properties: Theses to accept and theses to reject
    Revue Internationale de Philosophie 62 (1): 7-24. 2008.
    The subjective properties of an experience are those which specify what having the experience is like for its subject. The sensational properties of an experience are those of its subjective properties that it does not possess in virtue of features of the way the experience represents the world as being (its representational content). Perhaps no topic in the philosophy of mind has been more vigorously debated in the past quarter-century than whether there are any sensational properties, so conce…Read more
  •  202
    Joint attention: Its nature, reflexivity, and relation to common knowledge
    In Naomi Eilan, Christoph Hoerl, Teresa McCormack & Johannes Roessler (eds.), Joint Attention: Communication and Other Minds, Oxford University Press. pp. 298-324. 2005.
    The openness of joint awareness between two or more subjects is a perceptual phenomenon. It involves a certain mutual awareness between the subjects, an awareness that makes reference to that very awareness itself. Properly characterized, such awareness can generate iterated awareness ‘x is aware that y is aware that x is aware...’ to whatever level the subjects can sustain. The openness should not be characterized in terms of Lewis–Schiffer common knowledge, the conditions for which are not met…Read more
  •  198
    Deviant Causal Chains
    Midwest Studies in Philosophy 4 (1). 1979.
  •  180
    Perception, Content and Rationality (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 79 (2). 2009.
    Anil Gupta's Empiricism and Experience is a stylish and stimulating contribution to our subject. My expectation is that those who disagree with some of its central theses will, like me, learn greatly from thinking through where and why they part company with Gupta's lucidly presented position. For the purposes of a Symposium, I select three points of disagreement. Each point in one way or another concerns the epistemic role of the content of experience.
  •  175
    Our Entitlement to Self-Knowledge
    Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 96 (1): 91-116. 1996.
    Tyler Burge, Christopher Peacocke; Our Entitlement to Self-Knowledge, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 96, Issue 1, 1 June 1996, Pages 91–116, ht.
  •  173
    Interrelations: Concepts, Knowledge, Reference and Structure
    Mind and Language 19 (1): 85-98. 2004.
    This paper has five theses, which are intended to address the claims in Jerry Fodor's paper. (1) The question arises of the relation between the philosophical theory of concepts and epistemology. Neither is explanatorily prior to the other. Rather, each relies implicitly on distinctions drawn from the other. To explain what makes something knowledge, we need distinctions drawn from the theory of concepts. To explain the attitudes mentioned in a theory of concepts, we need to use the notion of kn…Read more
  •  171
    XI*—Externalist Explanation1
    Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 93 (1): 203-230. 1993.
    Christopher Peacocke; XI*—Externalist Explanation1, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 93, Issue 1, 1 June 1993, Pages 203–230, https://doi.org/10.