Jonathan A. Cohen

This paper challenges the traditional understanding of secondary affect, on which the latter is a cognitive appraisal of a somatic state that already has an antecedent, primary affect. We appeal to cases of acquired anosmia—the loss of the sense of smell—to argue that there are instances where secondary affect arises in the absence of (indeed, because of the absence of) primary affect, and that this can be so even when the secondary state is completely veridical. We conclude that, in this specific sense, secondary affect need not be secondary after all.

The law has taken a long-standing interest in the mind. Cognitive neuroscience, the study of the mind through the brain, has gained prominence in part as a result of the advent of functional neuroimaging as a widely used tool for psychological research. Existing legal principles make virtually no assumptions about the neural bases of criminal behavior, and as a result they can comfortably assimilate new neuroscience without much in the way of conceptual upheaval: new details, new sources of evidence, but nothing for which the law is fundamentally unprepared. Neuroscience challenges ultimately reshape our intuitive sense of justice. It draws a familiar distinction between the consequentialist justification for state punishment, according to which punishment is merely an instrument for promoting future social welfare, and the retributivist justification for punishment, according to which the principal aim of punishment is to give people what they deserve based on their past actions.

Phenomenal Contrast Arguments (PCAs) are a prominent method in philosophy of mind for, among other uses, investigating how specific mental features shape the phenomenal character of experience. This paper identifies a general and underexplored obstacle to the success of PCAs: The necessity of demonstrating that the contrasts employed in these arguments are genuinely phenomenal, rather than merely cognitive or otherwise non-phenomenal. We contend that proponents of PCAs often assume a phenomenal difference without adequately ruling out these alternative explanations for the available contrast. While we do not preclude the possibility of successful PCAs, our arguments suggest that many existing instances fail to meet this burden.

A long-cherished view in philosophy and psychology treats perception as largely consisting in a set of segregated feature detectors. However, the current evidence suggests that this traditional view is false: there is significant interaction between distinct types of information at all levels of perception. This chapter argues that embracing an “integrative” view of perception has significant ramifications for discussions of modularity and the cognitive penetrability of perception. The chapter claims that, contrary to standard interpretations, an integrative conception of perception is compatible with a robust, if revisionary, understanding of modularity that upholds the purposes for which the notion was originally introduced, and usefully complicates the relation between the modular/non-modular distinction and the perception/cognition distinction: it shows how perceptual processes can fail to be modular without, ipso facto, being penetrated by cognition.

Color relationalism is the view that colors are constituted in terms of relations between subjects and objects. The most historically important form of color relationalism is the classic dispositionalist view according to which, for example red is the disposition to look red to standard observers in standard conditions (mutatis mutandis for other colors).1 However, it has become increasingly apparent in recent years that a commitment to the relationality of colors bears interest that goes beyond dispositionalism (Cohen, 2004; Matthen, 1999, 2001, 2005; Thompson, 1995). Accordingly, it is an important project for those interested in the metaphysics of color to sort through and assess different forms of color relationalism. There is, however, a powerful and general cluster of objections that has been thought by many to amount to a decisive refutation of any and all forms of color relationalism. Although this idea has been developed in a number of ways, the basic thought is that relationalism — qua theory of color — is at odds with the manifest evidence of color phenomenology, and that this clash between theory and data should be resolved by giving up the theory.

This course is an introduction to the philosophy of language. Philosophy of language concerns quite a large number of topics, including meaning, truth, content, reference, the syntax and semantics of various linguistic constructions, the nature and role of presupposition in communicative interchange, speech acts, figurative uses of language, questions about the ontology of languages, the epistemology of language understanding and language learning, the mental/psychologial basis of linguistic understanding and use, and so on. Since we can't possibly study all of these topics, we'll focus our energy on topics that are most central in recent philosophical work on language, and that have far-reaching consequences for other topics in philosophy of language and other areas of philosophy.

This course is an introduction to contemporary work in epistemology -- roughly, the theory of knowledge -- and metaphysics -- roughly, the theory of what there is in the world. As such, the course will be devoted to fundamental questions about the world and our knowledge of it. What is matter? How is a priori knowledge possible? What does it mean for evidence to confirm a theory? In addressing these topics, we'll also discuss classic paradoxes involving truth, vagueness, space-time, and contradiction.

This is a course in recent and contemporary approaches to the theory of knowledge. We'll be looking at some of the major debates in epistemology, including those over the structure of knowledge, the proper analysis of knowledge, justification, and related notions, as well as some meta-epistemological issues that have arisen in recent discussions of so-called naturalized epistemology. The course will not presuppose any exposure to the relevant literatures, and will be a broad overview of some of the going accounts and controversies.