Snowdon on Personal Identity By Charles Jansen Seminars with Paul Snowdon would typically begin with a single argument, written in the middle of a whiteboard. Snowdon would unpick the argument premise by premise, disambiguating, clarifying and outlining how it departed from (or, less frequently, aligned with) what we might ordinarily …
By Tony Cheng In Memorial of Paul F. Snowdon Paul Snowdon began his academic journey as an undergraduate at University College, Oxford, where he was mentored by Sir. Peter Strawson. He later served as a tutorial fellow at Exeter College, Oxford, from 1971 to 2001. Following this, he held the …
Why are Visuo-spatial Representations Sometimes Weird? Rodrigo Garro Rivero, USC In cognitive science and philosophy, researchers hypothesize about the formats of mental representations via analogies to artifactual representations such as sentences, maps, pictures, etc. The guiding assumption is that if our mental representations were to be structured as artifactual representations, …
Factive Mentalizing and the Attribution of Desire Akshan deAlwis, Washington University Research on the extent of mentalizing – attributing and tracking the mental states of other minds – is highly heterogeneous. Some research indicates that mentalizing is fast, easy, and early developing, while other research indicates that it is slow, …
Why is Cognition Question-Sensitive? Juan Murillo Vargas (MIT) Author’s note: I no longer believe most of the paper’s claims. But I find the question interesting and worth thinking about, even if I think the answer I gave for it is no longer workable. I’m curious to hear what readers think! …
Humans see faces as beautiful: The role of superadditive mechanisms in determining visual content. Selina Guter, MIT Our conscious visual experience presents us with various features of objects: among others, their shape, color, and size. But what about aesthetic properties, like beauty? My paper argues that at least one kind …
By Sarah Robins, Purdue University Thanks to the Brains Blog for featuring some of the great work from the latest SSPP meeting this week. There are several ‘phil & psych societies’, so it feels worth kicking off the week with a note about what distinguishes the SSPP. The SSPP is, …
