Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Duration: 2015 - 2018

Code: FFI2014-51811-P

Principal Investigator

Josefa Toribio (jtoribio@icrea.cat)

All researchers

Marc Artiga (UB)

Carlos Jaén (UB)

David Lobina (UB)

Fiona Macpherson (University of Glasgow)
Manolo Martínez (University of Antwerp)

Abel Martínez (UB)

Jesús Navarro (Universidad de Sevilla)

Indrek Reiland (UB)

Miguel Ángel Sebastián (Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas, UNAM)
Susanna Siegel (Harvard University)
Ernest Sosa (Rutgers University)

Summary

In recent years, there have been a number of proposals that introduce different dimensions of complexity in the analysis of perceptual experiences. To the singularity of the phenomenology of each perceptual modality, it is now added a specific phenomenology of attention. The idea that the unique phenomenology of each perceptual modality entails a unified metaphysics is, in turn, questioned.

The analysis of the content of perceptual experiences also reflects this complexity. It is argued, on the one hand, that perceptual content is richer than it has been traditionally assumed with respect to the type of properties that we are able to perceive. On the other hand, it has been defended that certain sensations demand an imperative type of content, which should thus be added to the proverbial indicative content of perception. The complex philosophical landscape that emerges from these new approaches opens, finally, new avenues for the analysis of the epistemological relationships between perception and thought.

In this project we aim to advance the philosophical analysis of perception from a multidimensional perspective that incorporates some of the most innovative proposals in contemporary philosophy of mind. The project is built around five lines of analysis, which touch on the metaphysics, epistemology, richness and content of perceptual experience, as well as the role that attention plays in determining its phenomenology. The project seeks to achieve five intertwined objectives:

1. To analyse and evaluate the idea that perception has a disunified metaphysics, i.e., the idea that perceptual experiences are metaphysically complex events and that this complex metaphysics is needed to explain different aspects of their phenomenology.

2. To critically examine the thesis that we can perceive not just simple, but also complex properties (rich views), and to consider the relation between this claim and the cognitive penetrability thesis. To discuss and evaluate, in particular, recent arguments supporting the possibility of perceiving evaluative properties.

3. To advance the study of the contents of perception. To improve our understanding of the psycho-semantics of imperative content and de se content. To critically examine whether a teleosemantic theory of the content of perception can help justify rich and disunified views.

4. To contribute to the philosophical inquiry into the phenomenon of attention, as well as to the analysis of its effects on the phenomenology of experience. To discuss, in particular, whether attention has a specific distinguishable phenomenology and to examine the relationship between attention and mental agency.

5. To analyse the very notion of perceptual knowledge through an examination of the relationships between rich views of the content of experience and the theoretical tools of the so-called agential turn in epistemology. To offer a novel perspective to the sceptical problem of other minds based on the defence of a notion of perceptual content as being both rich and imperative.

Total budget: €48.400
1 FPI Fellow