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On understanding schizophreniaIn Dan Zahavi (ed.), Exploring the Self: Philosophical and Psychopathological Perspectives on Self-experience, John Benjamins. 2000.
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3The Explanatory Role of ConsciousnessIn Timothy O'Connor & Constantine Sandis (eds.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Action, Wiley‐blackwell. 2010.This chapter contains sections titled: The Problem Perceptual Consciousness and Action: Experimental Dissociations and Commonsense Connections Awareness of Intentions and Action Initiation References.
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33Sensorimotor skills and perceptionProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 106 (1): 67-88. 2006.[Andy Clark] What is the relation between perceptual experience and the suite of sensorimotor skills that enable us to act in the very world we perceive? The relation, according to 'sensorimotor models' is tight indeed. Perceptual experience, on these accounts, is enacted via skilled sensorimotor activity, and gains its content and character courtesy of our knowledge of the relations between movement and sensory stimulation. I shall argue that this formulation is too extreme, and that it fails t…Read more
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On understanding schizophreniaIn Dan Zahavi (ed.), Exploring the Self: Philosophical and Psychopathological Perspectives on Self-experience, John Benjamins. 2000.
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Joint attention, communication, and mindIn Naomi Eilan, Christoph Hoerl, Teresa McCormack & Johannes Roessler (eds.), Joint Attention: Communication and Other Minds: Issues in Philosophy and Psychology, Oxford University Press. 2005.
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55Intersubjective exchangesPhilosophical Explorations 23 (3): 292-301. 2020.Richard Moran’s “social-relational” account of illocutionary acts such as telling takes off from, and develops, a particularly powerful version of Reid’s notion of “social acts of mind”. On his ver...
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69IV*—The First Person PerspectiveProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 95 (1): 51-66. 1995.Naomi Eilan; IV*—The First Person Perspective, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 95, Issue 1, 1 June 1995, Pages 51–66, https://doi.org/10.1093/ar.
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33Perceptual Objectivity and Consciousness: A Relational Response to Burge’s ChallengeTopoi 36 (2): 287-298. 2017.My question is: does phenomenal consciousness have a critical role in explaining the way conscious perceptions achieve objective import? I approach it through developing a dilemma I label ‘Burge’s Challenge’, which is implicit in his approach to perceptual objectivity. It says, crudely: either endorse the general structure of his account of how objective perceptual import is achieved, and give up on a role for consciousness. Or, relinquish Caused Representation, and possibly defend a role for co…Read more
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14Objectivity and the Perspective of ConsciousnessEuropean Journal of Philosophy 5 (3): 235-250. 2002.
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151On the role of perceptual consciousness in explaining the goals and mechanisms of vision: A convergence on attention?Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 80 (1): 67-88. 2006.The strong sensorimotor account of perception gives self-induced movements two constitutive roles in explaining visual consciousness. The first says that self-induced movements are vehicles of visual awareness, and for this reason consciousness ‘does not happen in the brain only’. The second says that the phenomenal nature of visual experiences is consists in the action-directing content of vision. In response I suggest, first, that the sense in which visual awareness is active should be explain…Read more
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110Intelligible Realism about Consciousness: A Response to Nagel's ParadoxRatio 27 (1): 32-52. 2013.Is the location of consciousness in the objectively represented world intelligible? The paper examines the grounds for Nagel's negative answer, which can be presented as a response to the following paradox. (1) We are realists about consciousness. (2) Realism about a domain of reference requires commitment to the possibility of an objective, perspective-free conception of it. (3) The phenomenal character of an experience can only be captured by means of perspectival concepts. According to Nagel,…Read more
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161The You TurnPhilosophical Explorations 17 (3): 265-278. 2014.This introductory paper sets out a framework for approaching some of the claims about the second person made by the papers collected in the special edition of Philosophical Explorations on The Second Person . It does so by putting centre stage the notion of a ‘bipolar second person relation’, and examining ways of giving it substance suggested by the authors of these papers. In particular, it focuses on claims made in these papers about the existence and/or nature of second person thought, secon…Read more
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171Consciousness, acquaintance and demonstrative thought (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 63 (2). 2001.Suppose you are a blindsighted subject and an experimenter sitting opposite you says of an object in your functionally blind field ‘that peach looks delicious’. Unless you move your head to encompass the object within your normal field of vision you will not know which object she is talking about. Suppose now she reverts to the strategy used by neurophsychologists who work with blindsighted subjects and simply tells you that there is an object there and asks you either to reach for it or guess i…Read more
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25‘Like the shadow of one’s own head, [the referent of one’s ‘I’ thoughts] will not wait to be jumped on. And yet it is never very far ahead; indeed, sometimes it does not seem to be ahead of the pursuer at all. It evades capture by lodging itself in the very inside of the muscles of the pursuer. It is too near even to be within arm’s reach.’(C of M 177-89)
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15Perceptual Intentionality. Attention and ConsciousnessRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 43 181-202. 1998.A representative expression of current thinking on the ‘problem of consciousness’ runs as follows. There is one, impenetrably hard problem; and a host of soluble, and in this sense easy problems. The hard problem is: how could a physical system yield subjective states? How could there be something it is like to be a physical system? This problem corresponds to a concept of consciousness invariably labelled ‘phenomenal consciousness’. It is here, with respect to phenomenal consciousness, that we …Read more
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160Objectivity and the perspective of consciousnessEuropean Journal of Philosophy 5 (3): 235-250. 1997.
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70Experiential objectivityIn Johannes Roessler, Hemdat Lerman & Naomi Eilan (eds.), Perception, Causation, and Objectivity, Oxford University Press. 2011.To be a 'commonsense realist' is to hold that perceptual experience is (in general) an immediate awareness of mind-independent objects, and a source of direct knowledge of what such objects are like. Over the past few centuries this view has faced formidable challenges from epistemology, metaphysics, and, more recently, cognitive science. However, in recent years there has been renewed interest in it, due to new work on perceptual consciousness, objectivity, and causal understanding. This volume…Read more
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22Agency and Self-Awareness: Issues in Philosophy and PsychologyPhilosophical Quarterly 55 (220): 528-530. 2005.
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The Explanatory Role of Consciousness in ActionIn Sabine Maasen, Wolfgang Prinz & Gerhard Roth (eds.), Voluntary action: brains, minds, and sociality, Oxford University Press. pp. 188-201. 2003.
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256The Body and the Self (edited book)MIT Press. 1995.Table of Contents Acknowledgments 1 Self-Consciousness and the Body: An Interdisciplinary Introduction by Naomi Eiland, Anthony Marcel and José Luis Bermúdez 2 The Body Image and Self-Consciousness by John Campbell 3 Infants’ Understanding of People and Things: From Body Imitation to Folk Psychology by Andrew N. Meltzoff and M. Keith Moore 4 Persons, Animals, and Bodies by Paul F. Snowdon 5 An Ecological Perspective on the Origins of Self by George Butterworth 6 Objectivity, Causality, and Agenc…Read more
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50On understanding schizophreniaIn Dan Zahavi (ed.), Exploring the Self: Philosophical and Psychopathological Perspectives on Self-experience, John Benjamins. pp. 97--113. 2000.
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208Joint Attention: Communication and Other Minds: Issues in Philosophy and Psychology (edited book)Oxford: Clarendon Press. 2005.Sometime around their first birthday most infants begin to engage in relatively sustained bouts of attending together with their caretakers to objects in their environment. By the age of 18 months, on most accounts, they are engaging in full-blown episodes of joint attention. As developmental psychologists (usually) use the term, for such joint attention to be in play, it is not sufficient that the infant and the adult are in fact attending to the same object, nor that the one’s attention cause …Read more
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14Consciousness, Acquaintance and Demonstrative ThoughtPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 63 (2): 433-440. 2001.Suppose you are a blindsighted subject and an experimenter sitting opposite you says of an object in your functionally blind field ‘that peach looks delicious’. Unless you move your head to encompass the object within your normal field of vision you will not know which object she is talking about. Suppose now she reverts to the strategy used by neurophsychologists who work with blindsighted subjects and simply tells you that there is an object there and asks you either to reach for it or guess i…Read more
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135Spatial representation: problems in philosophy and psychology (edited book)Blackwell. 1993.Spatial Representation presents original, specially written essays by leading psychologists and philosophers on a fascinating set of topics at the intersection of these two disciplines. They address such questions as these: Do the extraordinary navigational abilities of birds mean that these birds have the same kind of grip on the idea of a spatial world as we do? Is there a difference between the way sighted and blind subjects represent the world 'out there'? Does the study of brain-injured sub…Read more
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1Problems in the Philosophy and Psychology of Spatial Representation (edited book)Blackwell. 1993.
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205On the Paradox of Gestalt Switches: Wittgenstein’s Response to KohlerJournal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 2 (3). 2013.Wittgenstein formulates the paradox of gestalt switches thus: ‘What is incomprehensible is that nothing, and yet everything has changed, after all. That is the only way to put it’. In the course of isolating what I take to be the best of the various solutions to the paradox explored by Wittgenstein, the following claims are defended: (a) A significant strand in Wittgenstein’s own formulation of, and solution to, the paradox can best be understood as a response to three specific claims made by th…Read more
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |