Louise Daoust

Shepherd defends an account of the universe founded on two causal principles: that effects necessarily have causes, and that like causes have like effects. Folding mind into the class of natural phenomena governed by these principles, Shepherd naturalizes the mind, but in doing so she sets herself the challenge of explaining how, within a deterministic universe, agents can be necessary causes of their own actions. With special attention to Shepherd’s resistance to materialism and to any reduction of the mental, the paper argues that we can read Shepherd as leveraging her original theory of causation to develop a distinctive compatibilist view of the psychology of intention, one that makes agents the necessary causal sources of their own actions. Published on 2022-10-28 10:36:44.

Do the physical facts of the viewed environment account for the ordinary experiences we have of that environment? According to standard philosophical views, distal facts do account for our experiences, a phenomenon explained by appeal to perceptual constancy, the phenomenal stability of objects and environmental properties notwithstanding physical changes in proximal stimulation. This essay reviews a significant but neglected research tradition in experimental psychology according to which percepts systematically do not correspond to mind-independent distal facts. Instead, stability of percept values comes in degrees, and physical facts about the viewed environment alone do not account for our ordinary experiences of the world. I conclude that more attention to descriptive research in psychophysics is warranted if what is sought is a philosophical theory of the nature of our perceptual relation with the world.

On Mary Shepherd's view of our perception of the external world, perceived qualities are "as a landscape, sent from an unseen country by which we may know it". Originally published in 1827, Shepherd's Essays on the Perception of an External Universe made important contributions in epistemology and the philosophy of perception, among other areas. In Antonia LoLordo's much-anticipated new edition of the text, advanced undergraduate students and scholars alike will find an inviting and authoritative introduction to Shepherd's work, followed by a modernized and annotated copy of the text. LoLordo's is the first modern edition of Shepherd's EPEU. Inexpensive...