•  512
    ABSTRACTThis article addresses the question of whether certain experiences that originate in causes other than bereavement are properly termed ‘grief’. To do so, we focus on widespread experiences of grief that have been reported during the Covid-19 pandemic. We consider two potential objections to a more permissive use of the term: grief is, by definition, a response to a death; grief is subject to certain norms that apply only to the case of bereavement. Having shown that these objections are …Read more
  •  474
    Absence experience in grief
    European Journal of Philosophy 31 (1): 163-178. 2022.
    In this paper, I consider the implications of grief for philosophical theorising about absence experience. I argue that whilst some absence experiences that occur in grief might be explained by extant philosophical accounts of absence experience, others need different treatment. I propose that grieving subjects' descriptions of feeling as if the world seems empty or a part of them seems missing can be understood as referring to a distinctive type of absence experience. In these profound absence …Read more
  •  441
    The Epistemological Power of Taste
    Journal of the American Philosophical Association 7 (3): 398-416. 2021.
    It is generally accepted that sight—the capacity to see or to have visual experiences—has the power to give us knowledge about things in the environment and some of their properties in a distinctive way. Seeing the goose on the lake puts me in a position to know that it is there and that it has certain properties. And it does this by, when all goes well, presenting us with these features of the goose. One might even think that it is part of what it is to be a perceptual capacity that it has this…Read more
  •  283
    Flavour, Taste and Smell
    Mind and Language 28 (3): 322-341. 2013.
    I consider the role of psychology and other sciences in telling us about our senses, via the issue of whether empirical findings show us that flavours are perceived partly with the sense of smell. I argue that scientific findings do not establish that we're wrong to think that flavours are just tasted. Non-naturalism, according to which our everyday conception of the senses does not involve empirical commitments of a kind that could be corrected by empirical findings is, I suggest, a plausible v…Read more
  •  260
    Seeing empty space
    European Journal of Philosophy 18 (2): 227-243. 2009.
    Abstract: In this paper I offer an account of a particular variety of perception of absence, namely, visual perception of empty space. In so doing, I aim to make explicit the role that seeing empty space has, implicitly, in Mike Martin's account of the visual field. I suggest we should make sense of the claim that vision has a field—in Martin's sense—in terms of our being aware of its limitations or boundaries. I argue that the limits of the visual field are our own sensory limitations, and that…Read more
  •  220
    Sniffing and smelling
    Philosophical Studies 162 (2): 401-419. 2013.
    In this paper I argue that olfactory experience, like visual experience, is exteroceptive: it seems to one that odours, when one smells them, are external to the body, as it seems to one that objects are external to the body when one sees them. Where the sense of smell has been discussed by philosophers, it has often been supposed to be non-exteroceptive. The strangeness of this philosophical orthodoxy makes it natural to ask what would lead to its widespread acceptance. I argue that philosopher…Read more
  •  137
    Space, Time and Molyneux's Question
    Ratio 27 (4): 483-505. 2014.
    Whatever the answer to Molyneux's question is, it is certainly not obvious that the answer is ‘yes’. In contrast, it seems clear that we should answer affirmatively a temporal variation on Molyneux's question, introduced by Gareth Evans. I offer a phenomenological explanation of this asymmetry in our responses to the two questions. This explanation appeals to the modality-specific spatial structure of perceptual experience and its amodal temporal structure. On this explanation, there are differe…Read more
  •  121
    How should interaction between the senses affect thought about them? I try to capture some ways in which non sense-specific perception might be thought to make it impossible or pointless or explanatorily idle to distinguish between senses. This task is complicated by there being more than one view of the nature of the senses, and more than one kind of non sense-specific perception. I argue, in particular, that provided we are willing to forgo certain assumptions about, for instance, the relation…Read more
  •  96
    On the Appropriateness of Grief to Its Object
    Journal of the American Philosophical Association 1-17. forthcoming.
    How we understand the nature and role of grief depends on what we take its object to be and vice versa. This paper focuses on recent claims by philosophers that grief is frequently or even inherently irrational or inappropriate in one or another respect, all of which hinge on assumptions concerning the proper object of grief. By emphasizing the temporally extended structure of grief, we offer an alternative account of its object that undermines these assumptions and dissolves the apparent proble…Read more
  •  62
    IX—Perceptual Activity and Bodily Awareness
    Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 115 (2pt2): 147-165. 2015.
    Bodily awareness is a kind of perceptual awareness of the body that we do not usually count as a sense. I argue that that there is an overlooked agential difference between bodily awareness and perception in the five familiar senses: a difference in what is involved in perceptual activity in sight, hearing, touch taste and smell on the one hand, and bodily awareness on the other
  •  58
    For the most part, philosophical discussion of the senses has been concerned with what distinguishes them from one another, following Grice’s treatment of this issue in his ‘Remarks on the senses’. But this is one of two questions which Grice raises in this influential paper. The other, the question of what distinguishes senses from faculties that are not senses, is the question I address in this thesis. Though there are good reasons to think that the awareness we have of our bodies is perceptua…Read more
  •  57
    Perception and its Modalities (review)
    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2015. 2015.
  •  56
    Odours as Olfactibilia
    In Thomas Crowther & Clare Mac Cumhaill (eds.), Perceptual Ephemera, Oxford University Press. pp. 93-114. 2018.
    It is natural to think that sight is distinctive amongst the senses in that we typically see ordinary objects directly, rather than seeing a visual equivalent to a sound or odour. It is also natural to think that sounds and odours (like rainbows and holograms) are sensibilia, in that they are each intimately related to just one of our senses. In this chapter, I defend these natural-seeming claims. I present a view on which odours are indeed sensibilia, a claim that is in need of defence when con…Read more
  •  31
    Grief over Non-Death Losses: A Phenomenological Perspective
    Passion: Journal of the European Philosophical Society for the Study of Emotion 1 (1): 50-67. 2023.
    Grief is often thought of as an emotional response to the death of someone we love. However, the term “grief” is also used when referring to losses of various other kinds, as with grief over illness, injury, unemployment, diminished abilities, relationship breakups, or loss of significant personal possessions. Complementing such uses, we propose that grief over a bereavement and other experiences of loss share a common phenomenological structure: one experiences the loss of certain possibilities…Read more
  •  28
    Grief, Smell and the Olfactory Air of a Person
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 104 (4): 769-790. 2023.
    Philosophical research into olfaction often focuses on its limitations. We explore instead an underappreciated capacity of the sense of smell, namely, its role in interpersonal experience. To illustrate this, we examine how smell can enable continuing connections to deceased loved ones. Understanding this phenomenon requires an appreciation of, first, how olfaction's limitations can facilitate experiences of the deceased person and, second, how olfaction enables experiences of what we refer to a…Read more
  •  26
    Purpose and Procedure in Philosophy of Perception (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 2021.
    Contemporary philosophy of perception is dominated by extremely polarized debates. The polarization is particularly acute in the debate between naïve realist disjunctivists and their opponents, but divisions seem almost as stark in other areas of dispute (for example, the debate over whether we experience so-called ‘high-level’ properties, and the debate concerning individuation of the senses). The guiding hypothesis underlying this volume is that such polarization stems from insufficient attent…Read more
  •  24
    Memory can play two quite different roles in grief. Memories involving a deceased loved one can make them feel either enjoyably present, or especially and painfully absent. In this paper, we consider what makes it possible for memory to play these two different roles, both in grief and more generally. We answer this question by appeal to the phenomenological nature of vivid remembering, and the context in which such memories occur. We argue that different contexts can make salient different aspe…Read more
  •  15
    Grief and the non-death losses of Covid-19
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 22 (5): 1087-1103. 2023.
    Articles in the popular media and testimonies collected in empirical work suggest that many people who have not been bereaved have nevertheless grieved over pandemic-related losses of various kinds. There is a philosophical question about whether any experience of a non-death loss ought to count as grief, hinging upon how the object of grief is construed. However, even if one accepts that certain significant non-death losses are possible targets of grief, many reported cases of putative pandemic…Read more
  •  11
    Sight and the body
    In Frédérique de Vignemont & Adrian Alsmith (eds.), The Subject's Matter, Mit Press. 2017.
    When I see some object, it visually seems as if the location of that object is distinct from the location from which it is perceived. For example, if I hold out my pencil in front of me, it visually seems to be at some location there, but I seem to it see it from some other location here. The place from which one perceives is, of course, occupied by one's body, and in this chapter I consider whether, in order to capture sight's spatial perspectival character, we need to accept that in normal vis…Read more
  •  6
    Whatever the answer to Molyneux's question is, it is certainly not obvious that the answer is ‘yes’. In contrast, it seems clear that we should answer affirmatively a temporal variation on Molyneux's question, introduced by Gareth Evans. I offer a phenomenological explanation of this asymmetry in our responses to the two questions. This explanation appeals to the modality‐specific spatial structure of perceptual experience and its amodal temporal structure. On this explanation, there are differe…Read more
  •  1
    Smelling Gustatory Properties
    In Benjamin D. Young & Andreas Keller (eds.), Theoretical Perspectives on Smell, . 2022.
    This chapter argues that gustatory properties such as sweetness or saltiness are not proprietary to the sense of taste. Rather, we can maintain the common-sense view that such properties can be smelled as well as tasted.