A series of blog posts featuring scholars in the philosophy and science of mind.
Snowdon on Knowing One’s Own Experience By Tony Cheng Paul F. Snowdon passed away unexpectedly in summer 2022. The posts dedicating to our memories of him were written a while ago, and we are pleased that these pieces can finally appear after some delays. Personally, I first met Paul back …
Paul Snowdon on Animalism By Helen Steward I first came across Paul Snowdon’s thinking on animalism as a result of attending his lectures on the subject in Oxford in what I believe was probably the 1990s, though I have no reliable way of checking that date. Though Paul had been …
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 …
Knowing is a state of mind that can’t be wrong. If anyone knows that p, then p must be the case. My last post raised the question of why adults attribute that state of mind so heavily, in their ordinary descriptions and explanations of agency, rather than relying on what …
My first post in this series observed that (if usage is any guide) adults attribute knowledge an awful lot. My most recent post hinted that knowledge attribution might be a necessary bridge to reach belief attribution in the course of children’s development, and ended by raising the puzzle of why …
My last post went back to babies, to see if the dawn of mental state attribution might show us something about the relationship between knowledge and belief. Even for those who take the concept of belief to be innate or very early-developing, belief attribution is weirdly dependent on knowledge attribution …
