A ‘perceptual demonstrative’ thought is a thought of the kind standardly made available by a perceptual link with an ordinary thing, and standardly expressed using ‘this’ or ‘that’ – for example, when you look at a grapefruit on the table in front of you and think the thought you would …
Remember the causo-descriptivist wars? If your education was anything like mine, at some point you were walked across the old battlefield and shown some of the main sights: early naïve descriptivism about proper names; its cluster theoretic successor; Kripke’s attack on descriptivism in Naming and Necessity; his causal inheritance picture; …
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 …
Rilkean Memory The exploration of the role of the act of remembering in constructing – or, as I prefer, sculpting – the content of episodic memory begins with the identification of a novel form of remembering that I call Rilkean memory, after the Bohemian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who provided …
The Presence of the Self in Memory In Memory and the Self, I operated with a claim that was, in hindsight, perhaps made a little too blithely. The essence of episodic memory, I argued, is that it presents an episode (a certain kind of state-of-affairs) in a specific way. You …
Thanks to John Schwenkler for the invitation to guest-blog this week about my new book, Memory and the Self: Phenomenology, Science and Autobiography (Oxford University Press NY, 2016). *** Memory and the Autobiographical Self: The Problem Intuitively, it is not unreasonable to suppose that our episodic memories play a significant …
I am very pleased to launch our latest Mind & Language symposium on Katharina A. Helming, Brent Strickland, and Pierre Jacob’s “Solving the Puzzle about Early Belief-Ascription” from the journal’s September 2016 issue, with commentaries by Hayley Clatterbuck (Rochester), Marco Fenici (Florence), Daniel Hutto (Wollongong), Josef Perner (Salzburg), Rose Scott (UC Merced), and Evan Westra with Peter Carruthers (Maryland).
