Max Minden Ribeiro

In this doctoral thesis, I defend an account of perceptual presence. My account has descriptive and explanatory aspects. In the descriptive account, I argue that perceptual presence is a strand of phenomenal character whereby experience manifestly depends on mind-independent objects. I identify two forms of manifest dependence, manifest spatial dependence and manifest temporal dependence. Each form reflects the apparent fulfilment of an enabling condition for successful perception. My explanatory account locates perceptual presence within a metaphysical framework. I argue that perceptual presence can be accommodated within a point of view-act-object framework, and reject appeals to an attitude-content framework. I also reject the view that presence is not perceptual at all. Both the descriptive and explanatory aspects of the thesis are guided by the aim of placing perceptual experience within a broader account of the mind. This involves attending to the similarities and differences between perceptual experience and other kinds of experience, both in their phenomenal character and functional role. Sensory imagination and experiential memory are especially valuable here, for though their phenomenal characters are in some ways like that of perceptual experience, they don’t possess presence. As a companion to my account of perceptual presence, I offer an account of the phenomenal pastness of experiential memory. Pastness is to be explained by experiential memory’s characteristic pattern of dependence both on its objects and its subject.

This article critically examines two claims Mattia Riccardi ascribes to Nietzsche in his 2021 book Nietzsche’s Philosophical Psychology. The first is that Nietzsche’s main notion of consciousness should be interpreted as Rconsciousness. Rconsciousness is an awareness of a mental state or process that is achieved when that state is linguistically interpreted by another state. This article finds that Riccardi’s account commits to two instances of states becoming conscious and to two kinds of consciousness. The second claim is that Nietzsche advances a pluralism about consciousness, endorsing a perceptual form of consciousness, Pconsciousness, and a qualitative consciousness of sensations, Qconsciousness. As Riccardi’s account offers no criteria for what it takes to be conscious per se, it is unclear what the pluralism he ascribes to Nietzsche amounts to. Moreover, this article finds that Nietzsche offers no positive reason to conceive any candidate mental phenomena as conscious other than those that are linguistically-reflexively conscious.

Perceptual experience and visual imagination both offer a first-person perspective on visible objects. But these perspectives are strikingly different. For it is distinctive of ordinary perceptual intentionality that objects seem to be present to the perceiver. I term this phenomenal property of experience ‘presence’. This paper introduces a positive definition of presence. Dokic and Martin (2017) argue that presence is not a genuine property of perceptual experience, appealing to empirical research on derealisation disorders, Parkinson’s disease, virtual reality and hallucination. I demonstrate that their arguments fall short of establishing that presence is not perceptual.

Mohan Matthen holds that visual perceptual content is divided into descriptive and referential elements. Descriptive content is our awareness of sensory features belonging to objects located in the visual field. Matthen conceives of this in terms of an image. The referential element is a demonstrative form of content, by which we pick out those objects as particulars and assert their physical presence. Matthen terms this ‘the feeling of presence’. Together, they make up the ‘assembled message’ that visual states present to the perceiver in perceptual experience. I argue that the two elements cannot play together as Matthen envisages. Beginning with the referential element, I show that the feeling of presence is unable to both provide demonstrative reference and assert that the visual state reflects how things are. Turning to the descriptive element, I argue that Matthen is committed to a view on which descriptive (or image) content is a mental entity, a reified image. This is a common element across perceptual experience, episodic memory and visual imagination. The mental entity proves a defective ingredient in assembling perceptual content that purports to present reality. There are problems integrating the depicted viewpoint with the subject’s actual viewpoint, and problems maintaining a coherent notion of assertion. I argue that the project of assembling perceptual experience from descriptive and referential elements is unworkable.