Plants don’t have minds. At least, that’s what most people think. A few years ago, that’s also what I thought. Then, reflecting on the work of Ruth Millikan and Fred Dretske, I started wondering why it seemed obvious, and whether it should. This led me to write a short book …
We are grateful to Chauncey Maher (Dickinson College) for blogging this week on Plant Minds: A Philosophical Defense, forthcoming from Routledge. To view all his posts, click here.
In the final chapter of The Given, I describe the rich complexity involved in experiencing emotions. I restrict my attention to occurrent emotional episodes that are not only conscious, but are also intentional. I consider two questions: [i] What kind of property attributions do we typically make in having emotions? …
Chapter 8 of The Given discusses the topic of cognitive phenomenology. My view of the matter is simple: either accept cognitive phenomenology or deny that there is such a thing as conscious thought. How can you deny the existence of conscious thought?! So, grant that cognitive phenomenology exists. Cognitive phenomenology, …
Consider the visual experience of a normally functioning subject who consciously sees a red ball in front of her in daylight. This experience has representational properties, it is of or about something, e.g. the red ball, and it has phenomenological properties, e.g. there is something it is like to see …
A guiding idea of The Given is that the notion of mental content is essentially rooted in the notion of what is given in experience. In order for something to be given in experience it must be phenomenologically present in some manner or other. That is, everything that is given …
I called my book The Given (Oxford University Press, 2016) because I set out to answer the question, What is given in experience? What does one have to do in order to give an adequate characterization of how the world is given to us, an adequate characterization of how we …
