Casey O'Callaghan

Last updated
Casey O'Callaghan
Education Princeton University (PhD), Rutgers University (BA)
Awards NEH, 2017–18[ citation needed ]
Era 21st-century philosophy
Region Western philosophy
Institutions Washington University in St. Louis
Main interests
philosophy of mind and perception, metaphysics
Website caseyocallaghan.com

Casey O'Callaghan is an American philosopher and Professor of Philosophy and Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology at Washington University in St. Louis. He is known for his works on philosophy of perception. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Philosophy of perception</span> Branch of philosophy

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.

The problem of other minds is a philosophical problem traditionally stated as the following epistemological question: Given that I can only observe the behavior of others, how can I know that others have minds? The problem is that knowledge of other minds is always indirect. The problem of other minds does not negatively impact social interactions due to people having a "theory of mind" - the ability to spontaneously infer the mental states of others - supported by innate mirror neurons, a theory of mind mechanism, or a tacit theory. There has also been an increase in evidence that behavior results from cognition which in turn requires consciousness and the brain.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hilary Putnam</span> American mathematician and philosopher (1926–2016)

Hilary Whitehall Putnam was an American philosopher, mathematician, and computer scientist, and a major figure in analytic philosophy in the second half of the 20th century. He made significant contributions to philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of science. Outside philosophy, Putnam contributed to mathematics and computer science. Together with Martin Davis he developed the Davis–Putnam algorithm for the Boolean satisfiability problem and he helped demonstrate the unsolvability of Hilbert's tenth problem.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Donald Davidson (philosopher)</span> American philosopher (1917–2003)

Donald Herbert Davidson was an American philosopher. He served as Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1981 to 2003 after having also held teaching appointments at Stanford University, Rockefeller University, Princeton University, and the University of Chicago. Davidson was known for his charismatic personality and the depth and difficulty of his thought. His work exerted considerable influence in many areas of philosophy from the 1960s onward, particularly in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and action theory. While Davidson was an analytic philosopher, and most of his influence lies in that tradition, his work has attracted attention in continental philosophy as well, particularly in literary theory and related areas.

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. In this sense, it is important that direct perceptual contact with the external world is the source of knowledge. So an experienced hiker is someone who 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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Dummett</span> British philosopher (1925–2011)

Sir Michael Anthony Eardley Dummett was an English academic described as "among the most significant British philosophers of the last century and a leading campaigner for racial tolerance and equality." He was, until 1992, Wykeham Professor of Logic at the University of Oxford. He wrote on the history of analytic philosophy, notably as an interpreter of Frege, and made original contributions particularly in the philosophies of mathematics, logic, language and metaphysics. He was known for his work on truth and meaning and their implications to debates between realism and anti-realism, a term he helped to popularize. He devised the Quota Borda system of proportional voting, based on the Borda count. In mathematical logic, he developed an intermediate logic, already studied by Kurt Gödel: the Gödel–Dummett logic.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">J. J. C. Smart</span> Australian philosopher and academic

John Jamieson Carswell Smart, was a British-Australian philosopher and was appointed as an Emeritus Professor by the Australian National University. He worked in the fields of metaphysics, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion, and political philosophy. He wrote multiple entries for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Early modern philosophy</span> Period in the history of philosophy

Early modern philosophy is a period in the history of philosophy that overlaps with the beginning of the period known as modern philosophy.

Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski is an American philosopher. She is the Emerita George Lynn Cross Research Professor, as well as Emerita Kingfisher College Chair of the Philosophy of Religion and Ethics, at the University of Oklahoma. She writes in the areas of epistemology, philosophy of religion, and virtue theory.

A mental state, or a mental property, is a state of mind of a person. Mental states comprise a diverse class, including perception, pain/pleasure experience, belief, desire, intention, emotion, and memory. There is controversy concerning the exact definition of the term. According to epistemic approaches, the essential mark of mental states is that their subject has privileged epistemic access while others can only infer their existence from outward signs. Consciousness-based approaches hold that all mental states are either conscious themselves or stand in the right relation to conscious states. Intentionality-based approaches, on the other hand, see the power of minds to refer to objects and represent the world as the mark of the mental. According to functionalist approaches, mental states are defined in terms of their role in the causal network independent of their intrinsic properties. Some philosophers deny all the aforementioned approaches by holding that the term "mental" refers to a cluster of loosely related ideas without an underlying unifying feature shared by all. Various overlapping classifications of mental states have been proposed. Important distinctions group mental phenomena together according to whether they are sensory, propositional, intentional, conscious or occurrent. Sensory states involve sense impressions like visual perceptions or bodily pains. Propositional attitudes, like beliefs and desires, are relations a subject has to a proposition. The characteristic of intentional states is that they refer to or are about objects or states of affairs. Conscious states are part of the phenomenal experience while occurrent states are causally efficacious within the owner's mind, with or without consciousness. An influential classification of mental states is due to Franz Brentano, who argues that there are only three basic kinds: presentations, judgments, and phenomena of love and hate.

Bimal Krishna Matilal was an eminent British-Indian philosopher whose writings presented the Indian philosophical tradition as a comprehensive system of logic incorporating most issues addressed by themes in Western philosophy. From 1977 to 1991, he was the Spalding Professor of Eastern Religion and Ethics at the University of Oxford.

Tyler Burge is an American philosopher who is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at UCLA. Burge has made contributions to many areas of philosophy, including the philosophy of mind, philosophy of logic, epistemology, philosophy of language, and the history of philosophy.

Keith Sedgwick Donnellan was an American philosopher and professor of philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Barry Stroud</span> Canadian philosopher (1935–2019)

Barry Stroud was a Canadian philosopher and professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Known especially for his work on philosophical skepticism, he wrote about David Hume, Ludwig Wittgenstein, the metaphysics of color, and many other topics.

Transcendental Humanism in philosophy considers humans as simultaneously the originator of meaning, and subject to a larger ultimate truth that exists beyond the human realm (transcendence). The philosophy suggests that the humanistic approach is guided by “accuracy, truth, discovery, and objectivity” that transcends or exists apart from subjectivity.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jennifer Lackey</span> American philosopher

Jennifer Lackey is an American academic; she is the Wayne and Elizabeth Jones Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University. Lackey is known for her research in epistemology, especially on testimony, disagreement, memory, the norms of assertion, and virtue epistemology. She is the author of Learning from Words: Testimony as a Source of Knowledge and of numerous articles and book chapters. She is also co-editor of The Epistemology of Testimony and The Epistemology of Disagreement: New Essays.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Agent causation</span> Idea in philosophy

Agent causation, or Agent causality, is an idea in philosophy which states that a being who is not an event—namely an agent—can cause events. Agent causation contrasts with event causation, which occurs when an event causes another event. Whether agent causation as a concept is logically sound is itself a topic of philosophical debate.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alan R. White</span> Canadian analytic philosopher

Alan Richard White was an analytic philosopher who worked mainly in epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and, latterly, legal philosophy. Peter Hacker notes that he was "the most skillful developer of Rylean ... ideas in philosophical psychology" and that "if anyone surpassed Austin in subtlety and refinement in the discrimination of grammatical differences, it was White." Richard Swinburne remarks that "during the heyday of 'ordinary language philosophy' no tongue practised it better."

Naomi Eilan is a British philosopher and professor of philosophy at the University of Warwick, whose works concern consciousness, philosophy of mind, metaphysics and philosophy of psychology.

Dutch philosophy is a broad branch of philosophy that discusses the contributions of Dutch philosophers to the discourse of Western philosophy and Renaissance philosophy. The philosophy, as its own entity, arose in the 16th and 17th centuries through the philosophical studies of Desiderius Erasmus and Baruch Spinoza. The adoption of the humanistic perspective by Erasmus, despite his Christian background, and rational but theocentric perspective expounded by Spinoza, supported each of these philosopher's works. In general, the philosophy revolved around acknowledging the reality of human self-determination and rational thought rather than focusing on traditional ideals of fatalism and virtue raised in Christianity. The roots of philosophical frameworks like the mind-body dualism and monism debate can also be traced to Dutch philosophy, which is attributed to 17th century philosopher René Descartes. Descartes was both a mathematician and philosopher during the Dutch Golden Age, despite being from the Kingdom of France. Modern Dutch philosophers like D.H. Th. Vollenhoven provided critical analyses on the dichotomy between dualism and monism.

References

  1. Casati, Roberto; Dokic, Jerome; Di Bona, Elvira (2020). "Sounds". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy . Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University.
  2. Kulvicki, John (2008). "Review of Sounds: A Philosophical Theory". Mind. 117 (468): 1112–1116. doi:10.1093/mind/fzn140. ISSN   0026-4423. JSTOR   20532720.
  3. Gritten, A. (1 October 2012). "Sounds: A Philosophical Theory * Sounds and Perception: New Philosophical Essays". The British Journal of Aesthetics. 52 (4): 430–434. doi:10.1093/aesthj/ays018.
  4. Meadows, Phillip John (1 July 2018). "In Defense of Medial Theories of Sound". American Philosophical Quarterly. 55 (3): 293–302. doi: 10.2307/45128622 . JSTOR   45128622.
  5. Kalderon, Mark Eli (16 October 2017). "Review of Beyond Vision: Philosophical Essays". Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. ISSN   1538-1617.
  6. Méndez-Martinez, Jorge Luis (11 June 2019). "Što se računa »kao zvuk" i kako "izbrojati« zvuk. Problem individuiranja i identificiranja zvuka". Synthesis Philosophica (in Croatian). 34 (1): 173–190. doi: 10.21464/sp34112 . ISSN   0352-7875.
  7. Mendez-Martinez, Jorge Luis (2020). "If Sounds were Dispositions, a framework proposal for an undeveloped theory". Organon F. 27 (4): 446–479. doi:10.31577/orgf.2020.27403. S2CID   228943987.