Thomas Crowther

Some writers have argued that processes are ‘continuants’; that they persist over time in the way that concrete material objects do on an endurantist ontology. The first part of the chapter attempts to show that these arguments should be resisted. The second part of the chapter develops the idea that there is a philosophically significant analogy between process and space-filling stuffs. According to this analogy, process can be understood as a kind of ‘temporal stuff’. The chapter responds to arguments against this analogy and goes on to argue that an understanding of the analogy with space-filling stuff is central to a grasp of why processes are not continuants. The final part of the chapter, again drawing on this analogy, goes on to develop the idea that processes occupy time by ‘occurrent renewal’ over periods of time.

ABSTRACT The aim of the paper is to describe the temporal ontology of that basic manifestation of social agency that is the living of life together. The distinction between states, processes and events is clarified. There are notions of ‘doing things together’ that fall into each of these temporal categories. The ontology of the state of friendship is examined as one instance of living life together. Friendship is a state of community between agents that is sustained by a continuity of processes and events that are characteristic manifestations of the state, some (but not all) of which are processes of doing things together. The continuity of processes and events involved in friendship is distinctive in lacking a telic point. Further instances of shared life that possess this characteristic temporal structure are described. It is argued that this notion of a mode of shared life cannot be recovered from various kinds of temporally extended agential structures that are the ingredients of Michael Bratman’s work on shared agency. In so doing, I clarify the notion of a shared life and make a case for the fruitfulness of approaching questions about joint action from the perspective of work on the ontology of time occupation.

Watching, looking at, and listening to, are all things that perceiving agents actively do. Though the occurrence of these activities appears to entail perception of elements of the agent's environment, perception is not something that can be actively done by agents. This raises the question how perceptual activity and perception are related to one another. This chapter, through reflecting on a discussion of listening offered by Brian O'Shaughnessy, argues that listening to material particulars ought to be understood as the agential maintenance of aural awareness of those particulars, with the aim of knowing what sounds they are making. He goes on to explore some of the consequences of these claims about listening for exercises of perceptual agency involving the other sensory modalities.

This chapter is an attempt to arrive at an understanding of the notion of a ‘solid look’, as such looks or appearances are understood as properties of material objects rather than of experiences. The early sections of the chapter explore why the notion of solid looks is particularly puzzling. As M.G.F. Martin has argued, solidity is not an observational property, but neither is the relation between solidity and its appearance contingent. I argue that the look of solidity should be understood in terms of the distinctive way that objects with such a look manifestly take up space, a way of taking up space that is to be elucidated in terms of the notions of touch and of capacities for bodily action.

This chapter works towards a better understanding of the contribution made by the state of wakeful consciousness to the stream of consciousness over time. It does this through reflection on what is missing in certain cases of non-wakeful consciousness. Granting the assumption that dreaming is a mode of perceptual imagination, the chapter contrasts perceptual imagination in the wakeful condition with perceptual imagination in dreaming sleep. It makes a suggestion about what is missing that draws on claims about the wakeful condition made by Brian O’Shaughnessy. According to this suggestion, what is missing is the occurrence of intentional mental action accompanied by non-inferential self-awareness. Building on a critique of O’Shaughnessy’s discussion, the chapter develops a ‘Capacitation Thesis’ about wakeful consciousness, according to which wakefulness is a state of being capacitated with respect to a range of relevant capacities. Imagination in the dream is discussed in the light of this thesis.

This introductory chapter gives a detailed overview of current debates and questions in the philosophy of perceptual ephemera. The chapter begins by identifying the notion of ‘the ephemeral’ that connects the contributions to the volume; the notion of ‘the insubstantial’ rather than the notion of ‘the fleeting’ or ‘short-lived’. Various ontological and phenomenological questions associated with ephemera and with perceptual experience of the ephemeral are then distinguished. The authors go on to identify a number of more specific themes in the philosophy of the ephemeral, and provide a brief introduction to how the contributors to this collection engage with these themes. The authors attempt to make a case for the view that reflection on ‘ephemera’ and ‘the ephemeral’ may enrich and challenge prevailing approaches in contemporary philosophy of perception.

There is a much‐discussed form of argument the conclusion of which is that we do not directly perceive space‐filling material objects themselves, only parts of their surfaces. Donald Davidson's view that events are temporal particulars invites a structurally similar argument about the direct perception of events. In this paper, I spell out such an argument and consider a number of possible solutions to it. I explore the idea that a satisfactory response to this problem in the philosophy of perception can be grounded in a temporal ontology that includes temporal stuff as well as temporal particulars. I discuss different ways of developing this idea, and I go on to identify what I take to be the most promising version of an approach of this kind.

Reflection on cases involving the occurrence of various types of perceptual activity suggests that the phenomenal character of perceptual experience can be partly determined by agential factors. I discuss the significance of these kinds of case for the dispute about phenomenal character that is at the core of recent philosophy of perception. I then go on to sketch an account of how active and passive elements of phenomenal character are related to one another in activities like watching and looking at things.

Though it enjoys widespread support, the claim that perceptual experiences possess nonconceptual content has been vigorously disputed in the recent literature by those who argue that the content of perceptual experience must be conceptual content. Nonconceptualism and conceptualism are often assumed to be well-defined theoretical approaches that each constitute unitary claims about the contents of experience. In this paper I try to show that this implicit assumption is mistaken, and what consequences this has for the debate about perceptual experience. I distinguish between two different ways that nonconceptualist proposals about perceptual content can be understood: as claims about the constituents that compose perceptual contents or as claims about whether a subject’s undergoing experiences with those contents requires them to possess the concepts that characterize those contents. I maintain that these ways of understanding conceptualism and nonconceptualism are orthogonal to one another. This is revealed by the conceptual coherence of positions in which the contents of experiences have both conceptual and nonconceptual features; positions which possess their own distinctive sources of philosophical motivation. I argue that the fact that there is a place in conceptual space for such positions, and that there may be good reason for theorists to adopt them, creates difficulties for both the central argument for nonconceptualism and the central argument for conceptualism. I set out each of these arguments; the Argument from Possession-Independence and the Epistemically-Driven Argument. I then try to show how the existence of mixed positions about perceptual content derived from a clear distinction between compositional and possessional considerations constitutes a significant obstacle for those arguments as they stand. The takehome message of the paper is that unless one clearly acknowledges the distinction between issues about the composition of perceptual content and issues about how subject’s capacities to undergo certain experiences relates to their possession of concepts one runs the risk of embracing unsatisfying philosophical arguments in which conclusions relevant to one conception of nonconceptual and conceptual content are grounded on arguments that concern only the other; arguments that cannot, in themselves, sustain them.

There is a much-discussed form of argument the conclusion of which is that we do not directly perceive space-filling material objects themselves, only parts of their surfaces. Donald Davidson's view that events are temporal particulars invites a structurally similar argument about the direct perception of events. In this paper, I spell out such an argument and consider a number of possible solutions to it. I explore the idea that a satisfactory response to this problem in the philosophy of perception can be grounded in a temporal ontology that includes temporal stuff as well as temporal particulars. I discuss different ways of developing this idea, and I go on to identify what I take to be the most promising version of an approach of this kind.

There has been relatively little discussion, in contemporary philosophy of mind, of the active aspects of perceptual processes. This essay presents and offers some preliminary development of a view about what it is for an agent to watch a particular material object throughout a period of time. On this view, watching is a kind of perceptual activity distinguished by a distinctive epistemic role. The essay presents a puzzle about watching an object that arises through elementary reflection on the consequences of two apparent truths about watching an object throughout a period of time. It proposes that the puzzle can be resolved by a view according to which for an agent to watch an object throughout a period of time is for that agent to maintain visual awareness of that object with the aim of perceptually knowing what that object is doing. The essay goes on to make some further suggestions about how the apparatus developed in connection with the notion of watching may enable us to offer related explanations of other kinds of perceptual activity. It proposes that a useful distinction can be drawn between perceptual activities like watching which have as their aim knowledge of what an object is doing and activities like looking or visually scrutinizing which have as their aims knowledge of the states or conditions of the objects of perceptual awareness.