The philosophy of perception is concerned with the nature of perceptual experience and the status of perceptual data, in particular how they relate to beliefs about, or knowledge of, the world. Any explicit account of perception requires a commitment to one of a variety of ontological or metaphysical views. Philosophers distinguish internalist accounts, which assume that perceptions of objects, and knowledge or beliefs about them, are aspects of an individual's mind, and externalist accounts, which state that they constitute real aspects of the world external to the individual. The position of naïve realism—the 'everyday' impression of physical objects constituting what is perceived—is to some extent contradicted by the occurrence of perceptual illusions and hallucinations and the relativity of perceptual experience as well as certain insights in science. Realist conceptions include phenomenalism and direct and indirect realism. Anti-realist conceptions include idealism and skepticism. Recent philosophical work have expanded on the philosophical features of perception by going beyond the single paradigm of vision.
Intentionality is the mental ability to refer to or represent something. Sometimes regarded as the mark of the mental, it is found in mental states like perceptions, beliefs or desires. For example, the perception of a tree has intentionality because it represents a tree to the perceiver. A central issue for theories of intentionality has been the problem of intentional inexistence: to determine the ontological status of the entities which are the objects of intentional states.
John Henry McDowell is a South African philosopher, formerly a fellow of University College, Oxford, and now university professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Although he has written on metaphysics, epistemology, ancient philosophy, nature, and meta-ethics, McDowell's most influential work has been in the philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. McDowell was one of three recipients of the 2010 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's Distinguished Achievement Award, and is a Fellow of both the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the British Academy.
Experience refers to conscious events in general, more specifically to perceptions, or to the practical knowledge and familiarity that is produced by these processes. Understood as a conscious event in the widest sense, experience involves a subject to which various items are presented. In this sense, seeing a yellow bird on a branch presents the subject with the objects "bird" and "branch", the relation between them and the property "yellow". Unreal items may be included as well, which happens when experiencing hallucinations or dreams. When understood in a more restricted sense, only sensory consciousness counts as experience. In this sense, experience is usually identified with perception and contrasted with other types of conscious events, like thinking or imagining. In a slightly different sense, experience refers not to the conscious events themselves but to the practical knowledge and familiarity they produce. Hence, it is important that direct perceptual contact with the external world is the source of knowledge. So an experienced hiker is someone who has actually lived through many hikes, not someone who merely read many books about hiking. This is associated both with recurrent past acquaintance and the abilities learned through them.
Wilfrid Stalker Sellars was an American philosopher and prominent developer of critical realism, who "revolutionized both the content and the method of philosophy in the United States".
Eliminative materialism is a materialist position in the philosophy of mind. It is the idea that the majority of mental states in folk psychology do not exist. Some supporters of eliminativism argue that no coherent neural basis will be found for many everyday psychological concepts such as belief or desire, since they are poorly defined. The argument is that psychological concepts of behavior and experience should be judged by how well they reduce to the biological level. Other versions entail the nonexistence of conscious mental states such as pain and visual perceptions.
In metaphysics, conceptualism is a theory that explains universality of particulars as conceptualized frameworks situated within the thinking mind. Intermediate between nominalism and realism, the conceptualist view approaches the metaphysical concept of universals from a perspective that denies their presence in particulars outside the mind's perception of them. Conceptualism is anti-realist about abstract objects, just like immanent realism is.
Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology is a book about epistemology by the philosopher Ayn Rand. Rand considered it her most important philosophical writing. First published in installments in Rand's journal, The Objectivist, July 1966 through February 1967, the work presents Rand's proposed solution to the historic problem of universals, describes how the theory can be extended to complex cases, and outlines how it applies to other issues in the theory of knowledge.
Gilbert Harman was an American philosopher, who taught at Princeton University from 1963 until his retirement in 2017. He published widely in philosophy of language, cognitive science, philosophy of mind, ethics, moral psychology, epistemology, statistical learning theory, and metaphysics. He and George Miller co-directed the Princeton University Cognitive Science Laboratory. Harman taught or co-taught courses in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Psychology, Philosophy, and Linguistics.
Ernest Sosa is an American philosopher primarily interested in epistemology. Since 2007 he has been Board of Governors Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University, but he spent most of his career at Brown University.
Paul Artin Boghossian is an American philosopher. He is Silver Professor of Philosophy at New York University, where he is chair of the department. His research interests include epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He is also director of the New York Institute of Philosophy and Distinguished Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham.
Peter Michael Stephan Hacker is a British philosopher. His principal expertise is in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and philosophical anthropology. He is known for his detailed exegesis and interpretation of the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, his critique of cognitive neuroscience, and for his comprehensive studies of human nature.
John Patrick Hawthorne is an English philosopher, currently serving as Professor of Philosophy at the Australian Catholic University in Melbourne, and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California. He is recognized as a leading contemporary contributor to metaphysics and epistemology.
Michael Tye is a British philosopher who is currently the Dallas TACA Centennial Professor in Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. He has made significant contributions to the philosophy of mind.
Timothy Martin Crane is a British philosopher specialising in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of perception, philosophy of psychology and metaphysics. His contributions to philosophy include a defence of a non-physicalist account of the mind; a defence of intentionalism about consciousness; a defence of the thesis that perceptual experience has non-conceptual content; a psychologistic approach to the objects of thought; and a defence of the thesis that intentionality is the mark of the mental. He is currently the Head of Department and Professor of Philosophy at Central European University, and was previously the Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Peterhouse. For the academic year 2020–21 he was a visiting professor at the University of Italian Switzerland.
Susanna Siegel is an American philosopher. She is the Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University and well known for her work in the philosophy of mind and epistemology, especially on perception.
In philosophy, a point of view is a specific attitude or manner through which a person thinks about something. This figurative usage of the expression dates back to 1730. In this meaning, the usage is synonymous with one of the meanings of the term perspective.
Anil K. Gupta is an Indian-American philosopher who works primarily in logic, epistemology, philosophy of language, and metaphysics. Gupta is the Alan Ross Anderson Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. He is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His most recent book, Conscious Experience: A Logical Inquiry, was published by Harvard University Press in 2019.
Martin Davies is a British philosopher who is Wilde Professor of Mental Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Oxford and Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford where he taught from 2006 until 2017. He works in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, epistemology and philosophy of psychology and cognitive science.
Robert D. Rupert is an American philosopher. His primary academic appointment is at the University of Colorado at Boulder (UCB), where he is Professor of Philosophy, a fellow of UCB's Institute of Cognitive Science, and a member of UCB's Committee on the History and Philosophy of Science. He is Regular Visiting professor at the University of Edinburgh’s Eidyn Centre and is the co-editor in chief of the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
