Online research in philosophy

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• Faculty, University of Toronto
• PhD, Princeton University, 2001.

• Philosophy of Mind
• 20th Century Philosophy

• 20th Century Philosophy
• Philosophy of Mathematics
• Philosophy of Probability
• Logic and Philosophy of Logic
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• Philosophy of Mind

My research is on philosophy of mind and history of early analytic philosophy, but I'm interested in a wide variety of topics in m&e, as well as a narrower variety in history and value theory. Research keywords: consciousness, perception, acquaintance, noise, discriminability, transparency, Moore, self-knowledge, concepts of consciousness, disjunctivism, attention, discourse about consciousness, direct realism, the knowledge argument, Hume, qualia, spectral inversion, personal relativism, inconsistent concepts, phenomenology, presence to the mind, representationalism, other minds, phenomenal concepts.

17 items found. Sort by: publication yearfirst authorviewingsaddition date Benj Hellie, Justin Fisher's 'Color Representations as Hash Values'. Color in Philosophy of Mind Reading list   |  Discuss  |  Edit  |  Categorize  |     My bibliography  |   Export citation | Scholar | Share & More ... Benj Hellie, Peacocke's 'Concepts of Conscious States'. Phenomenal Concepts in Philosophy of Mind Reading list   |  Discuss  |  Edit  |  Categorize  |     My bibliography  |   Export citation | Scholar | Share & More ... Benj Hellie, Visual Form, Attention, and Binocularity. This somewhat odd paper argues against a representational view of visual experience using an intricate "inversion" type thought experiment involving double vision: two subjects could represent external space in the same way while differing phenomenally due to different "spread" in their double images. The spatial structure of the visual field is explained not by representation of external space but functionally, in terms of the possible locations of an attentional spotlight. -/- I'm fond of the ideas in this paper but doubt (...) I'll be returning to it soon. (shrink) Attention and Consciousness in Philosophy of Mind Intentionalist Theories of Perception in Philosophy of Mind Spatial Experience in Philosophy of Mind Reading list   |  Discuss  |  Edit  |  Categorize  |     My bibliography  |   Export citation | Scholar | Share & More ... Benj Hellie (forthcoming). The Multidisjunctive Conception of Hallucination. In Fiona Mapherson (ed.), Hallucination. MIT Press. Direct realists think that we can't get a clear view the nature of /hallucinating a white picket fence/: is it /representing a white picket fence/? is it /sensing white-picket-fencily/? is it /being acquainted with a white' picketed' sense-datum/? These are all epistemic possibilities for a single experience; hence they are all metaphysical possibilities for various experiences. Hallucination itself is a disjunctive or "multidisjunctive" category. I rebut MGF Martin's argument from statistical explanation for his "epistemic" conception of hallucination, but his view (...) embeds in my view as a "reference-fixer". (shrink) Disjunctivism in Philosophy of Mind Knowledge of Consciousness in Philosophy of Mind Naive and Direct Realism in Philosophy of Mind Reading list   |  Discuss  |  Edit  |  Categorize  |     My bibliography  |   Export citation | Scholar | At my library | Share & More ... Benj Hellie (2010). An Externalist's Guide to Inner Experience. In Bence Nanay (ed.), Perceiving the World. Oxford University Press. Let's be externalists about perceptual consciousness and think the form of veridical perceptual consciousness includes /seeing this or that mind-independent particular and its colors/. Let's also take internalism seriously, granting that spectral inversion and hallucination can be "phenomenally" the same as normal seeing. Then perceptual consciousness and phenomenality are different, and so we need to say how they are related. It's complicated! Phenomenal sameness is (against all odds) /reflective indiscriminability/. I build a "displaced perception" account of reflection on which indiscriminability stems (...) from shared "qualia". Qualia are compatible with direct realism: while they generate an explanatory gap (and colors do not), so does /seeing/; qualia are excluded from perceptual consciousness by its "transparency"; instead, qualia are aspects of thought about the perceived environment. The asymmetry between my treatments of color and seeing is grounded in the asymmetry between ignorance and error: while inversion shows that normal subjects are ignorant of the natures of the colors, hallucination shows not that perceivers are ignorant of the nature of seeing but that hallucinators are prone to error about their condition. Past literature has treated inversion and hallucination as on a par: externalists see error in both cases, while internalists see mutual ignorance. My account is so complicated because plausible results require mixing it up. (shrink) Discriminability in Philosophy of Mind Disjunctivism in Philosophy of Mind Internalism and Externalism about Experience in Philosophy of Mind Knowledge of Consciousness in Philosophy of Mind The Concept of Consciousness in Philosophy of Mind Transparency in Philosophy of Mind Reading list   |  Discuss  |  Edit  |  Categorize  |     My bibliography  |   Export citation | Scholar | At my library | Share & More ... Benj Hellie (2009). Acquaintance. In Tim Bayne, Axel Cleeremans & Patrick Wilken (eds.), Oxford Companion to Consciousness. Oxford University Press. Knowledge of Consciousness in Philosophy of Mind Reading list   |  Discuss  |  Edit  |  Categorize  |     My bibliography  |   Export citation | Scholar | At my library | Share & More ... Benj Hellie (2009). Representationalism. In Patrick Wilken, Tim Bayne & Axel Cleeremans (eds.), Oxford Companion to Consciousness. Oxford UP. Representationalism in Philosophy of Mind Reading list   |  Discuss  |  Edit  |  Categorize  |     My bibliography  |   Export citation | Scholar | At my library | Share & More ... Benj Hellie (2007). Factive Phenomenal Characters. Philosophical Perspectives 21 (1):259--306. This paper expands on the discussion in the first section of 'Beyond phenomenal naivete'. Let Phenomenal Naivete be understood as the doctrine that some phenomenal characters of veridical experiences are factive properties concerning the external world. Here I present in detail a phenomenological case for Phenomenal Naivete and an argument from hallucination against it. I believe that these arguments show the concept of phenomenal character to be defective, overdetermined by its metaphysical and epistemological commitments together with the world. This does (...) not establish a gappish eliminativism, but a gluttish pluralism, on which there are many imperfect deservers of the name 'phenomenal character'. Different projects in the philosophy of mind -- phenomenology, philosophy of conscious, metaphysics and epistemology of perception -- are concerned with different deservers of the name. (shrink) Knowledge of Consciousness in Philosophy of Mind Naive and Direct Realism in Philosophy of Mind The Concept of Consciousness in Philosophy of Mind Reading list   |  Discuss  |  Edit  |  Categorize  |     My bibliography  |   Export citation  | Other links: blackwell-synergy.com   | Scholar | At my library | Share & More ... Benj Hellie (2007). Higher-Order Intentionalism and Higher-Order Acquaintance. Philosophical Studies 134 (3):289--324. I argue against such "Relation Intentionalist" theories of consciousness as the higher-order thought and inner sense views on the grounds that they understand a subject's awareness of his or her phenomenal characters to be intentional, like seeming-seeing, rather than "direct", like seeing. The trouble with such views is that they reverse the order of explanation between phenomenal character and intentional awareness. A superior theory of consciousness, based on views expressed by Russell and Price, takes the relation of awareness to be (...) a nonintentional "acquaintance". (shrink) Higher-Order Thought Theories of Consciousness in Philosophy of Mind Knowledge of Consciousness in Philosophy of Mind Reading list   |  Discuss  |  Edit  |  Categorize  |     My bibliography  |   Export citation  | Other links: springerlink.com ingentaconnect.com   | Scholar | At my library | Share & More ... Benj Hellie (2007). 'There's Something It's Like' and the Structure of Consciousness. Philosophical Review 116 (3):441--63. I discuss the meaning of 'There's something e is like', in the context of a reply to Eric Lormand's 'The explanatory stopgap'. I argue that Lormand is wrong to think it has a specially perceptual meaning. Rather, it has one of at least four candidate meanings: (a) e is some way as regards its subject; (b) e is some way and e's being that way is in the possession of its subject; (c) e is some way in the awareness of (...) its subject; (d) e's subject is the "experiencer" of e. I provide additional argumentation for the view in this paper that in the context, 'like this' functions as a predicate variable. (shrink) Higher-Order Theories of Consciousness, Misc in Philosophy of Mind Pronouns and Anaphora in Philosophy of Language What is it Like? in Philosophy of Mind Reading list   |  Discuss  |  Edit  |  Categorize  |     My bibliography  |   Export citation  | Other links: philreview.dukejournals.org   | Scholar | At my library | Share & More ... Benj Hellie (2007). That Which Makes the Sensation of Blue a Mental Fact: Moore on Phenomenal Relationism. European Journal of Philosophy 15 (3):334-66. I interpret the anti-idealist manoeuverings of the second half of Moore's 'The refutation of idealism', material as widely cited for its discussion of 'transparency' and 'diaphanousness' as it is deeply obscure. The centerpiece of these manoeuverings is a phenomenological argument for a relational view of perceptual phenomenal character, on which, roughly, 'that which makes the sensation of blue a mental fact' is a non-intentional relation of conscious awareness, a view close to the opposite of the most characteristic contemporary view going (...) under the transparency rubric. The discussion of transparency and diaphanousness is a sidelight, its principal purpose to shore up the main line of argumentation against criticism; in those passages all Moore argues is that the relation of conscious awareness is not transparent, while acknowledging that it can seem to be. (shrink) G. E. Moore in 20th Century Philosophy Sense-Datum Theories in Philosophy of Mind Transparency in Philosophy of Mind Reading list   |  Discuss  |  Edit  |  Categorize  |     My bibliography  |   Export citation  | Other links: blackwell-synergy.com   | Scholar | At my library | Share & More ... Benj Hellie (2006). Beyond Phenomenal Naivete. Philosophers' Imprint 6 (2):1-24. The naive realist takes a veridical visual experience to be an immediate relation to external entities. Is this how such an experience is phenomenally, by its phenomenal character? Only if there can be phenomenal error, since a hallucinatory experience phenomenally matching such a veridical experience would then be phenomenally but not in fact such a relation. Fortunately, such phenomenal error can be avoided: the phenomenal character of a visual experience involves immediate awareness of a sort of picture of external entities, (...) as on a representative theory of perception. The attraction of naive realism results from an erroneous projection of the immediacy of the subject's awareness of this picture onto the external entities pictured. (shrink) Attention and Consciousness in Philosophy of Mind Naive and Direct Realism in Philosophy of Mind Reading list   |  Discuss  |  Edit  |  Categorize  |     My bibliography  |   Export citation  | Other links: quot.lib.umich.edu   | Scholar | At my library | Share & More ... Benj Hellie (2005). Noise and Perceptual Indiscriminability. Mind 114 (455):481-508. Perception represents colors inexactly. This inexactness results from phenomenally manifest noise, and results in apparent violations of the transitivity of perceptual indiscriminability. Whether these violations are genuine depends on what is meant by 'transitivity of perceptual indiscriminability'. Color Experience in Philosophy of Mind Discriminability in Philosophy of Mind Knowledge of Consciousness in Philosophy of Mind Reading list   |  Discuss  |  Edit  |  Categorize  |     My bibliography  |   Export citation  | Other links: mind.oxfordjournals.org ingentaconnect.com   | Scholar | At my library | Share & More ... Benj Hellie (2004). Inexpressible Truths and the Allure of the Knowledge Argument. In Yujin Nagasawa, Peter Ludlow & Daniel Stoljar (eds.), There's Something About Mary. The Mit Press. I argue on linguistic grounds that when Mary comes to know what it's like to see a red thing, she comes to know a certain inexpressible truth about the character of her own experience. This affords a "no concept" reply to the knowledge argument. The reason the Knowledge Argument has proven so intractable may be that we believe that an inexpressible concept and an expressible concept cannot have the same referent. The Knowledge Argument in Philosophy of Mind What is it Like? in Philosophy of Mind Reading list   |  Discuss  |  Edit  |  Categorize  |     My bibliography  |   Export citation | Scholar | At my library | Share & More ... Benj Hellie (2002). Consciousness and Representationalism. In L. Nadel (ed.), Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. Macmillan. Representationalism in Philosophy of Mind Reading list   |  Discuss  |  Edit  |  Categorize  |     My bibliography  |   Export citation | Scholar | At my library | Share & More ... Benj Hellie (2001). Presence to the Mind: Issues in the Intentional Theory of Consciousness. Dissertation, Princeton University Representationalism in Philosophy of Mind Reading list   |  Discuss  |  Edit  |  Categorize  |     My bibliography  |   Export citation | Scholar | At my library | Share & More ... Benj Hellie, Jenann Ismael's 'Probability and Physics'. Interpretion of Probability, Misc in Philosophy of Probability Reading list   |  Discuss  |  Edit  |  Categorize  |     My bibliography  |   Export citation | Scholar | Share & More ...

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