This mode searches for entries containing all the entered words in their title, author, date, comment field, or in any of many other fields showing on OPC pages.
Surname
This mode searches for entries containing the text string you entered in their author field. Note that the database does not have first names for all authors, so it is preferable to search only by surnames. If you search for a full name or a name with an initial, enter it in the format used internally, namely the "Lastname, Firstname" or "Lastname, F." format.
Advanced
This mode differs from the all fields mode in two respects. First, some information not publicly available on the site is searched, e.g., abstracts and excerpts gathered by the crawler, which are not always accurate but can help broaden one's search. Second, you may prefix any term with a '+' or '-' to narrow the search to entries containing it or not containing it, respectively. Terms which are not prefixed by a '+' are not mandatory. Instead, they are weighed depending on their frequency in order to determine the best search results. You may also search for a literal string composed of several words by putting them in double quotation marks (").
Note that short and / or common words are ignored by the search engine.
Try PhilPapers to find published items which are available on a subscription basis.
Abstract: ABSTRACT: Quassim Cassam (1997) accepts the standard account of solidity, according to which, if S feels x as solid, then S feels x as an imediment to his movement. Recently, Martin Fricke and Paul Snowdon (2003) have presented a battery of counter-examples designed to show that S may feel x as solid and as exerting a pressure that supports or facilitates his movement. In this note, I defend the standard account against Fricke and Snowdon’s attack. Integral to this defense is a distinction between two (sometimes overlapping) ways in which S may feel x as an impediment to his movement: as an influence on a movement state of S, or as an obstacle to the achievement of a goal that requires movement. After demonstrating the primacy of the former sense, I argue that Fricke and Snowdon’s counter-examples only undermine a version of the standard account that glosses ‘impediment’ as an obstacle to the achievement of a goal that requires movement.
Abstract: The article is an overview of some central philosophical problems associated with perception. It discusses what distinguishes perception from other sensory capacities and from conception. It discusses anti-individualism, a view according to which the nature of a perceptual state is dependent not just causally but for its identity or 'essence' on relations to a normal environment in which systems containing that state were formed. It discusses different views about epistemic warrant. By emphasising the deep ways in which human and animal perceptual systems, especially visual systems, are similar, it criticises a dominant view of the last century, in both philosophy and large parts of psychology, according to which a range of sophisticated supplementary abilities have to be learned before a child can perceive objective features of the physical world.
Abstract: Imagine, if you will, that the entire community of investigators interested in the problems of perception all lived together in the same town. Some continual shuffling of neighbors would be inevitable, and there might be occasional episodes of mass relocation and energetic bulldozing, but after a while the residents would probably settle down and find themselves living in districts defined roughly by disciplinary boundaries. The experimental psychologists would occupy the newer part of town, laced with superhighways, workshops and factories, machines and measuring instruments, computers and overhead display units. But the town also has an Old City, marked by the complete absence of highways and factories, where the streets are lined with ancient hovels. There are, to be sure, some colossal palaces and museums in this part of town, breathtaking monuments to the grandeur of past centuries, but the current residents lack the inclination to construct such buildings, and many of the old palaces have been boarded up and condemned as unfit for human habitation. The somewhat scraggly and irascible inhabitants of this district have few viable economic enterprises, and no free markets, but rather organize themselves in units resembling nothing so much as medieval guilds. Congratulations. You have stumbled into the neighborhood where the philosophers live
Abstract: the philosophical regions. I will identify three: three obvious zones of The first and third of these kinds of problem are studied almost tectonic conflict within contemporary cognitive approaches to exclusively within departments of philosophy. Applied to perception
Abstract: The concept of second nature plays a central role in McDowell's project of reconciling thought's external constraint with its spontaneity or autonomy: our conceptual capacities are natural in the sense that they are fully integrated into the natural world, but they are a second nature to us since they are not reducible to elements that are intelligible apart from those conceptual capacities. Rather than offering a theory of second nature and an account of how we acquire one, McDowell suggests that Aristotle's account of ethical character formation as the acquisition of a second nature serves as a model that can reassure us that thought's autonomy does not threaten its naturalness. However, far from providing such reassurance, the Aristotelian model of second nature actually generates an anxiety about how the acquisition of such autonomous conceptual abilities could be possible.
Abstract: Much contemporary discussion of perceptual experience can be traced to two observations. The first is that perception seems to put us in direct contact with the world around us: when perception is successful, we come to recognize— immediately—that certain objects have certain properties. The second is that perceptual experience may fail to provide such knowledge: when we fall prey to illusion or hallucination, the way things appear may differ radically from the way things actually are. For much of the twentieth century, many of the most important discussions of perceptual experience could be fruitfully understood as responses to this pair of observations
Abstract: This paper defends two theses about sensory objects. The more general thesis is that directly sensed objects are those delivered by sub-personal processes. It is shown how this thesis runs counter to perceptual atomism, the view that wholes are always sensed indirectly, through their parts. The more specific thesis is that while the direct objects of audition are all composed of sounds, these direct objects are not all sounds—here, a composite auditory object is a temporal sequence of sounds (whereas a composite visual object is a spatial composite). Many composite objects are directly heard in the sense just mentioned. There is a great variety of such composite auditory objects—melodies, harmonies, sequences of phonemes, individual voices, meaning-carrying sounds, and so on. This diversity of auditory objects has an important application to aesthetics. Perceivers do not naturally or easily attend simultaneously to auditory objects that overlap in time. Yet, aesthetic appreciation depends on such an allocation of attention to overlapping objects
Abstract: Provides the theoretical and psychological framework to the philosophy of sounds and audition. I address auditory scene analysis, spatial hearing, the audible qualities, and cross-modal interactions.
