Let me begin by thanking John Schwenkler for the invitation to blog here at Brains. I’m not really a specialist in philosophy of mind (or in, well, anything) but a lot of my recent work is concerned with mind-y (and brain-y) issues. I find it hard to get excited about …
Together with my co-organizers Cameron Buckner and Nick Byrd, I am very pleased to announce the selection of papers for the first annual Minds Online Conference, which will be held at the Brains blog in September 2015. The conference will comprise four weeklong sessions, organized as described below. Further information, including …
It is my pleasure to introduce Neil Levy as the current Featured Scholar at the Brains blog, where he’ll contribute a series of posts over this week and the next. Neil is a Futures Fellow of the Australian Research Council. He is based in the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health in Melbourne as well as …
I will conclude this series of posts by saying something about why I think cognitive phenomenology is significant. The basic idea is that phenomenology in general is connected to epistemology, value theory, and semantics via the notion of awareness, and cognitive phenomenology in particular is connected to these areas via …
According to Mill “pleasure, and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends.” This does not imply that the good life is a degrading one, fit for swine, however, at least partly because there are “pleasures of the intellect, of the feelings and imagination, and of the moral …
According to William James experiences, including conscious thoughts, flow in a stream of consciousness. Peter Geach argued that whatever we say about other experiences, conscious thoughts at least do not flow, but rather occur in discrete sequences. A number of recent arguments against cognitive phenomenology take Geach’s criticisms of James …
In my first post I isolated Irreducibility as the main thesis in dispute about cognitive phenomenology: Irreducibility: Some cognitive states put one in phenomenal states for which no wholly sensory states suffice. In this post I am going to write about the role introspection should play in helping us decide …
