In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume and Davidson on Pride Pall S. krdal In reading the Treatise one has to be alive to the fact that Hume gives certain crucial words new meanings. He does not always draw the reader's attention to this and sometimes explicitly claims to be using terms with their ordinarymeaningswhen heis clearlygiving the words special technical uses by expanding or contracting their usual meanings. "Passion," "love," "hatred," (...) "pride," and "humility" have special meanings in Hume's psychological scheme. He also sometimes uses important terms with more than one meaning, as in the case of "justice." The word "justice" both is the title of Book 3, Part 2 of the Treatise, which deals with a number ofartificial virtues, and alsorefers to the much narrower concept ofthe respectfor property. The following two questions should be borne in mind: "What did Hume have to say about what he calls justice, passion, love, etc.?" and "What did Hume have to say about what we refer to by the same terms?" Thus, Books 2 and 3 of the Treatise may be described as attempting to show how unbiased evaluations are possible, in spite ofthe fact that our passions are naturally biased and judgments of virtue and vice are passions. This clearly involves a discussion of how we can do justice to our own and other peoples' qualities ofmind or character. Hume, therefore, had something very important to say about what we call justice, but his contribution to issues involving what we call justice today is obscured by his terminology. In what follows I shall be claiming that Hume's account of pride throws light upon what we call pride although he clearly was not aiming to do so. Donald Davidson, in a footnote to "Hume's Cognitive Theory of Pride," points out that there is a close similarity between his reading ofHume on pride andmy own treatment ofprideinPassionand Value. Since the two accounts were arrived at completely independently, each ofus can see the other'sinterpretation as some confirmation ofhis own. The accounts are not identical, however, and without aiming at a comprehensive comparison, I shall attempt to decide whether one or two ofthe apparent differences between our accounts indicate substantial disagreement. I shall try not to confuse the following four questions: "What did Hume thinkconstitutes pride?""Whatlesson do I, and whatlesson does Davidson think one could learn from Hume's account?" and finally, "What constitutes pride?" Davidson and I agree that a lesson is to be Volume XV Number 2 387 PALL ARDAL learned from Hume's account, but disagree about the nature of this lesson because of a disagreement about the nature of pride. Both Davidson and I think that Hume's claim that pride is a simple impression is an embarrassment to him. It does not have any immediate appeal and also leads him to clearly misrepresent the relation between pride and its object. Pride has self as its object in the sense that it is a form of self-evaluation. Hume misrepresents this relation as a causal relation between pride and the thoughtofoneself. Whenever one is proud, one's thought is drawn to oneself, but according to Hume it couldhave been otherwise. Itjust so happens that the feeling ofpride makes one think of oneself, that when you are already proud your thought turns to yourself. Hume, it is true, does not always represent the relation between the object of pride and the passion itself as contingent. Much ofwhathe says suggests the more plausible view that pride is essentially a form of self-evaluation, but the lesson we can learn from Hume we can learn in spite ofhis atomism, so let us follow Davidson and disregard the atomism, while admitting its presence in Hume's account. Davidson points out that the pride Hume is talking about is pride for a reason. I follow Hume in talking about the cause ofpride, or what makes one proud, but the two accounts seem to me to be very similar on this issue. The two accounts are alsoin agreement thatHume should have said that the proud person must see the cause of pride as having value rather than as an independent source of pleasure, but we are... (shrink)

Pride is a fundamental element in Hume's description of human nature. An important part of the secondary literature on Hume is devoted to this passion. However, no one, as far as I am aware, takes seriously the fact that pride often appears in pairs with vanity. In Book 2 of the Treatise, pride is defined as the passion one feels when society recognizes his connection to a ‘cause’, composed by a ‘subject’ and a (positive) ‘quality’. (...) Conversely, no definition of vanity is provided. Despite Hume's fluctuating vocabulary, I hold that a conceptual difference between pride and vanity exists. To support this claim, I analyse the common features of these two passions, showing that both pride and vanity (a) are indirect passions, (b) are self-regarding passions, and (c) have the same structure. Supported by textual evidence, I then claim that vanity is a desire of reputation, a desire to feel pride, when pride is not (yet) in place, because its cause is only imaginary and not real. Nonetheless, I underscore that, at times, ‘vanity’ means simply pride and call for greater attention on this ongoing oscillation. In conclusion, I explore the implications of this account of vanity for social interactions in Hume's philosophy, which illustrates its intrinsic ambivalence. (shrink)

In the Treatise, Hume focuses on pride as an “indirect passion,” one indicative of self-valuing and moral virtue and contributing positively to our sense of who we are and, in particular, to our moral identity. This essay examines those features of pride that make Hume’s account of the indirect passions so distinctive, beginning with an examination of his application of the experimental method to explain the origin of the indirect passions and the double relation of ideas (...) and impressions as the efficient causes of these passions. Also examined is the relationship Hume draws between the principle of sympathy, pride, and the causes of pride; the relations among pride in virtuous character, moral confidence and, competence; and Hume’s account of pride in the Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals. Finally, the author considers the view of Humean moral agency as heteronomous in nature. (shrink)

Many commentators have argued that on Hume’s account, pride turns out to be something that is unstable, context-dependent, and highly contingent. On their readings, whether or not an agent develops pride depends heavily on factors beyond her control, such as whether or not her house, which is beautiful, is also the most beautiful in her neighborhood and whether or not her neighbors will admire the beauty of her house rather than become envious of it. These aspects of (...) Hume’s theory of pride, the peculiarity requirement and the social dependency of pride, stand in tension with Hume’s claims that virtue reliably produces pride-in-virtue and that pride-in-virtue serves as a powerful motive to virtue. If pride depends on the affirmation of others and arises only from qualities that are peculiar to their possessor, will the virtuous person reliably develop pride-in-virtue? And if not, can pride-in-virtue serve the motivational role Hume attributes to it? This paper tackles these problems by showing how the virtuous develop pride-in-virtue and how the desire for pride-in-virtue can serve as a powerful and admirable motive to virtue. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Aesthetics and Humean Aesthetic Norms in the Novels of Jane AustenEva M. Dadlez (bio)IntroductionThe eighteenth century, Paul Oskar Kristeller tells us, in addition to crystallizing what we now call the fine arts, is also marked by an increased lay interest both in the arts and in criticism.1 Amateurs as well as philosophers ventured critical commentary on the arts. Talk concerning taste or beauty or the sublime was so much (...) a part of general discourse that even novelists of that era incorporated such subjects in their work. Henry Fielding "was able to construct a novel on the true and false sublime in art," according to Samuel Monk, "and to draw an analogy between the sublime in art and the sublime in character."2 So we shouldn't find it surprising that perspectives on aesthetics are sometimes presented in the novels of Jane Austen.3 This subject matter ranges from descriptions of skill in the execution and sensitivity in the appreciation of particular arts to general observations about beauty and taste and what is requisite for the apprehension of the former and the possession of the latter.Consider the following catalog of arts and beauties. Mansfield Park, Sense and Sensibility, and Northanger Abbey contain many references to the beauties of nature, both cultivated and wild. Taste in music is a topic in Persuasion, Mansfield Park, Pride and Prejudice, and Lady Susan. A taste for poetry and literature is the lot of the heroines of Persuasion, Northanger Abbey, Mansfield Park, and Sense and Sensibility. Taste and talent for drawing is exhibited by characters in Sense and Sensibility, Emma, and Northanger Abbey. Both Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park contain discussions of the merits of effective reading, that is, reading well aloud. Mansfield Park even comments on [End Page 46] acting ability, albeit rather disapprovingly. More general reflections on taste and beauty, as well as their connection to morality, are equally typical.It is possible to venture several different arguments about the philosophical perspective into which such observations best fit. Kantian analyses have already been ventured in the literature. Anne Crippen Ruderman calls our attention to the Kantian flavor of the connection Austen draws between a sensitivity to natural beauty and one's moral disposition, for instance, and David Kaufman compares Austen to Kant, though primarily in regard to ethics.4 Nonetheless, in this article I will argue that the strongest correlations and correspondences are in fact between Austen's and Hume's positions on aesthetics. Evidence in support of a Kantian analysis will first be canvassed and later compared with claims in favor of a Humean alternative.I will establish that the positions on taste and beauty and delicacy that are explicitly stated in or can be inferred from Austen's novels fit a Humean model—and fit it with a fair degree of precision. In doing so, I hope to demonstrate a correspondence strong enough to serve as the staging area for the further speculations that constitute the second thesis of this article. A great deal has already been said by philosophers about the capacity of literature to elicit moral reactions from the reader. Fictions can present ethical endorsements and invite us to adopt ethical perspectives by making it true in the world of the work that some course of action is right or some character is laudable. They can do this not by telling us that an act is right or a person meritorious but by showing us the rightness of the action and the commendability of the individual—by asking us to imagine traits that call forth our own approval and commendation. I will contend that aesthetic norms can be treated in much the same way as moral norms. That is, I will claim that the fiction of Jane Austen, in addition to evidencing the conscription of a Humean aesthetic, so engages and educates us that we are led imaginatively to adopt certain aesthetic perspectives in the course of its contemplation: not just by being told what is aesthetically pleasing or commendable, but by being made to feel pleasure and to experience commendation; not just by being told what constitutes discriminating taste, but by being led... (shrink)

In this paper, I reconstruct Hume's account of decency, the virtue associated with a limited display of pride, and show how it presents a significant challenge to standard virtue ethical interpretations of Hume. In section I, I explore his ambivalent conception of pride as both virtuous (because useful and agreeable to oneself) and vicious (when excessive and disagreeable to others). In section II, I show how the virtue of decency provides a practical solution to these two (...) clashing aspects of pride. In doing so, I demonstrate that decency is a merely behavioural virtue that requires no virtuous motive and consists of nothing more than "a fair outside." I argue that this account of decency represents a serious and underexplored challenge to standard interpretations of Hume as a virtue ethicist committed to the idea that actions derive their moral value from underlying motives. In section III, I reply to some objections. -/- . (shrink)

Jane Austen has long been recognized as a moral thinker. Below the surface of romance there is in her novels a moral message. I focus on Pride and Prejudice. Certain passages of this novel have been traced to Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments before. But Jane Austen did not only borrow two short passages from Adam Smith and inserted them into the text of her novel. My claim is that Jane Austen relied much more extensively (...) on the Theory of Moral Sentiments as a source of inspiration for this novel. Indeed, she used it, and in particular book VI.iii., the chapter on ‘self-command’ in the TMS, as a source of inspiration for designing the plot of this novel, for shaping some of the main characters, and for composing the moral message in the sub-text of this novel. By inviting her readers to share the point of view of the heroine, Elizabth Bennet, she involves them in a process of learning to be virtuous that bears strong resemblance to this process as Adam Smith described it in his moral theory. (shrink)

Love and pride are passions related to ideas of entities capable of well-being. In the case of love, those entities are people we are related to, whose characters, qualities or traits we admire; pride, by its turn, is a passion related to the self. In spite of that, Hume is explicit in stating that love is naturally attended by a desire for the goodness and happiness of the beloved being; but it does not make sense to say (...) that we desire our own happiness and well-being because we are proud of ourselves. How can we explain this asymmetry? First, I will deal with the problem of the contrast between the unrelatedness of the emotion of pride and the desire of our own happiness and the relatedness of passion of love and the desire of happiness of the beloved person. After, I will link the conclusions reached with Hume’s famous claim that we cannot be happy in solitude. Our own happiness depends not only on our own well-being and success, but also on the well-being and happiness of the people we love, and both of which are related to the well functioning of society in the long run. (shrink)

Drawing on the findings of neuroscience, this text proposes and defends the hypothesis that the various modalities of sensation share a generic form that the author, Austen Clark, calls feature-placing.

Drawing on work in psychophysics, psychometrics, and sensory neurophysiology, Clark analyzes the character and defends the integrity of psychophysical explanations of qualitative facts, arguing that the structure of such explanations is sound and potentially successful.

Consequentialist theories that directly assess multiple focal points face an important objection: that one right option may conflict with another. Robert Adams raises an instance of this objection regarding the possibility that the right act conflicts with the right motives. Whereas only partial responses have previously been given, assuming particular views of the relation between motives and acts, an exhaustive treatment is in order. Either motives psychologically determine acts, or they do not – and I defend direct consequentialism on each (...) assumption. Crucially, if motives determine acts, this may be compatible with the ability to act otherwise, but there remains a defense for consequentialism even on these assumptions. What clears consequentialism of conflict is not necessarily that the apparently right act is unavailable, but rather that its outcome is suboptimal once we account for necessary motives. Even if the agent remains free to perform the act, the act costs too much. (shrink)

This paper contrasts three different schemes of reference relevant to understanding systems of perceptual representation: a location-based system dubbed "feature-placing", a system of "visual indices" referring to things called "proto-objects", and the full sortal-based individuation allowed by a natural language. The first three sections summarize some of the key arguments (in Clark, 2000) to the effect that the early, parallel, and pre-attentive registration of sensory features itself constitutes a simple system of nonconceptual mental representation. In particular, feature integration--perceiving something as (...) being both F and G, where F and G are sensible properties registered in distinct parallel streams--requires a referential apparatus. Section V. reviews some grounds for thinking that at these earliest levels this apparatus is location-based: that it has a direct and nonconceptual means of picking out places. Feature-placing is contrasted with a somewhat more sophisticated system that can identify and track four or five "perceptual objects" or "proto-objects", independently of their location, for as long as they remain perceptible. Such a system is found in Zenon Pylyshyn's fascinating work on "visual indices", in Dana Ballard's notion of deictic codes, and in Kahneman, Treisman, and Wolfe's accounts of systems of evanescent representations they call "object files". Perceptual representation is a layered affair, and I argue that it probably includes both feature-placing and proto-objects. Finally, both nonconceptual systems are contrasted with the full-blooded individuation allowed in a natural language. (shrink)

Many philosophers doubt that one can provide any successful explanation of sensory qualities - of how things look, feel, or seem to a perceiving subject. To provide such an explanation, one would need to explain qualitative facts in non-qualitative terms. Attempts to construct such explanations have seemed, in principle, doomed. Austen Clark examines the strategy used in psychophysics, psychometrics, and sensory neurophysiology to explain qualitative facts. He argues that this strategy could succeed: its structure is sound, and it can (...) answer the various philosophical objections lodged against it. On this basis Professor Clark presents an analysis of senosry qualities that offers the possibility of explaining at least some qualia, and he sketches how this scheme might eventually reduce to neurophysiology. If he is correct, we are not doomed to an eternity of mere acquaintance with our qualia. (shrink)

We assemble here in this time and place to discuss the thesis that conscious attention can provide knowledge of reference of perceptual demonstratives. I shall focus my commentary on what this claim means, and on the main argument for it found in the first five chapters of "Reference and Consciousness". The middle term of that argument is an account of what attention does: what its job or function is. There is much that is admirable in this account, and I am (...) confident that it will be the foundation, the launching-pad, for much future work on the subject. But in the end I will argue that Campbell's picture makes the mechanisms of attention too smart: smarter than they are, smarter than they could be. If we come to a more realistic appraisal of the skills and capacities of our sub-personal minions, the "knowledge of reference" which they yield will have to be taken down a notch or two. (shrink)

Like many disciplines, moral philosophy is being subjected to critical scrutiny by feminist scholars. By applying a feminist critique of gender to the area of ethics, feminists pose the question, “Does gender make a difference?” or “Is ethics gendered?” Given that gender differences exist, it stands to reason that these differences might be institutionalized at the level of theory. Given also that different theories highlight different properties of a moral problem, theories can be evaluated according to how well, or how (...) poorly they account for gendered perspectives. Such gender differences need not be explained essentialistically, but may be explained as the result of different socialization strategies and the different social, political and economic standing of men and women. This discussion has seen the revival of the issue over whether ethical theory ought primarily to reflect care or justice, with the former reflecting a consequentialist approach with emphasis on concrete particulars and sentiment, and the latter reflecting a nonconsequentialist approach with emphasis on abstract universals and reason. (shrink)

If one examines the sky at sunset on a clear night, one seems to see a continuum of colors from reds, oranges and yellows to a deep blue-black. Between any two colored points in the sky there seem to be other colored points. Furthermore, the changes in color across the sky appear to be continuous. Although the colors at the zenith and the horizon are obviously distinct, nowhere in the sky can one see any color borders, and every sufficiently small (...) region of the sky is made up of regions that all seem to be of the same color. (shrink)

The papers by Macpherson, O'Callaghan, and Batty reveal some startling differences in the objects and properties represented by different modalities. They also reveal some tensions between different ways of understanding what it is for any one modality to represent objects and properties.

David Hume (1711-76) is the grand intellectual figure of the Scottish Enlightenment. Ironically, what is now considered his magnum opus, the ill-received three-volume A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), was rejected by Hume himself by 1751. Subsequently, when Hume first compiled his Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects two years later, he excluded the Treatise and considered this new collection of essays to be his complete philosophical writings. Hume revised the Essays and Treatises some ten times (...) in various editions, adding, modifying and deleting material. This 1777 edition incorporates his final changes which he made quite literally on his deathbed, fully aware that this edition would be the last to involve his input. As such it is considered the definitive edition of Hume's philosophical writings and should be read alongside the first definitive edition of the Treatise. (shrink)

Unpopular in its day, David Hume's sprawling, three-volume A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40) has withstood the test of time and had enormous impact on subsequent philosophical thought. Hume's comprehensive effort to form an observationally grounded study of human nature employs John Locke's empiric principles to construct a theory of knowledge from which to evaluate metaphysical ideas. A key to modern studies of eighteenth-century Western philosophy, the Treatise considers numerous classic philosophical issues, including causation, existence, freedom and necessity, (...) and morality. Unabridged republication of the edition originally published by Oxford at the Clarendon Press, London, 1888. Index. Appendix. (shrink)

When you suffer a pain are you suffering a sensation? An emotion? An aversion? Pain typically has all three components, and others too. There is indeed a distinct sensory system devoted to pain, with its own nociceptors and pathways. As a species of somesthesis, pain has a distinctive sensory organization and its own special sensory qualities. I think it is fair to call it a distinct sensory modality, devoted to nociceptive somesthetic discrimination. But the typical pain kicks off other processes (...) too. For one it can grab your attention in a distinctive way, alerting you to its presence and sometimes obliging you to focus attention on the damaged member. Intense pain can eliminate your ability to think about anything else. Pain typically has direct and immediate motivational consequences: one wants it to stop, has an incentive to do whatever one can to reduce it, and is gratified by its termination. As these desires and motives collide with neural reality, emotional components of mental anguish, anxiety, and dread arise. The suffering involved in suffering from pain has multiple strands: it is not just the painfulness of the sensation, or the frustration of the desire that it end, but also the anguish over the possibility that it will never end, and the impossibility, if the pain is sufficiently intense, of focusing one’s attention on anything else. (shrink)

This edition contains the thirty-nine essays included in Essays, Moral, and Literary, that made up Volume I of the 1777 posthumous Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects. It also includes ten essays that were withdrawn or left unpublished by Hume for various reasons. The two most important were deemed too controversial for the religious climate of his time. This revised edition reflects changes based on further comparisons with eighteenth-century texts and an extensive reworking of the index. - Publisher.

Although the capacity to discriminate between different qualia is typically admitted to have a definition in terms of functional role, the qualia thereby related are thought to elude functional definition. In this paper I argue that these views are inconsistent. Given a functional model of discrimination, one can construct from it a definition of qualia. The problem is similar in many ways to Goodman's definition of qualia in terms of 'matching', and I argue that many of his findings survive reinterpretation (...) into a physicalistic basis which employs 'indiscriminability' as its primitive term. I show how one can identify the critical properties to which discrimination capacities are sensitive, and then identify their order. A problem arises concerning the different ways in which qualitatively distinct experiences can differ (hue, shape, and so on). Physicalist accounts have often been accused of relying in a circular fashion on some antecedent understanding of phenomenal properties in order to specify those differences. This account avoids such an accusation: ordering of critical properties is determined by the dimensionality of discriminations, and the latter is given by the structure of the discrimination pair lists. Once a topology of quality is constructed, qualia names can be defined by their relative location within the order. In the conclusion I argue that psychophysics employs physicalist techniques to define a topology of quality, and that it can provide what Thomas Nagel calls an "objective phenomenology.". (shrink)

The psychofunctionalist claim that psychological terms can be defined through the use of an experimental theory has been criticized on the grounds that it is "chauvinistic": that it denies mentality to any creature of which the selected theory is false. I analyze the "argument from science fiction" that is thought to establish this conclusion, and show that its plausibility rests on a scope ambiguity in formulations of functional definitions. One formulation is indeed chauvinistic, but an alternative rendering is not, and (...) is perfectly consistent with ascribing mentality to creatures of which the selected psychological theory is false. This alternative interpretation of psychofunctionalism is set out in detail, defended from several objections, and finally tied to the semantics of ordinary language psychological terms. (shrink)

Spectrum inversion is a thought experiment, and I would wager that there is no better diagnostic test to the disciplinary affiliation of a randomly selected member of the audience than your reaction to a thought experiment. It is a litmus test. If you find that you are paying close attention, subvocalizing objections, and that your heart-rate and metabolism go up, you have turned pink: you are a philosopher. If on the other hand the thought experiment leaves you cold, and you (...) wonder why otherwise sensible people would worry about such things, you have turned blue and you are a psychologist. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

We assemble here in this time and place to discuss the thesis that conscious attention can provide knowledge of reference of perceptual demonstratives. I shall focus my commentary on what this claim means, and on the main argument for it found in the first five chapters of Reference and Consciousness. The middle term of that argument is an account of what attention does: what its job or function is. There is much that is admirable in this account, and I am (...) confident that it will be the foundation, the launching-pad, for much future work on the subject. But in the end I will argue that Campbell's picture makes the mechanisms of attention too smart: smarter than they are, smarter than they could be. If we come to a more realistic appraisal of the skills and capacities of our subpersonal minions, the "knowledge of reference" which they yield will have to be taken down a notch or two. But first let us clarify what the argument is. (shrink)

In this essay, I offer a vindication of pride. I start by presenting the Christian condemnation of pride as the cardinal sin. I subsequently examine Mandeville’s line of argument whereby pride is beneficial to society, although remaining a vice for the individual. Finally, I focus on, and endorse, the analysis of pride formulated by Hume, for whom pride qualifies instead as a virtue. This is because pride not only contributes to making society flourish (...) but also stabilizes the virtuous agent by creating a virtuous circle between our desire for self-appraisal and our aspiration to act morally. I conclude by underscoring the (virtuous) connection between pride and modesty, concomitantly arguing that humility should be discarded as vicious. (shrink)

I'm very happy here to be sandwiched between Lycan and Millikan, two of the living philosophers from whom I've probably learned the most, and to whom I am the most grateful. Plus the intermediary position is appropriate for someone commenting on intermediary representations in vision. There's much to like in Bill 's account of "layering" in visual representation. For one, it makes explicit and publicizes the notion that there are multiple layers of representation involved even in the seemingly simple achievement (...) of. (shrink)

When I was revising _Sensory Qualities_ there was a period of about a year when I set the manuscript aside and did other things. When I returned to it I found that certain portions of the argument had collapsed of their own weight, like an old New England barn, and could be carted off the premises without compunction. Other parts were wobbling on their foundation, while some had weathered well and seemed nice and solid. My revision strategy was simple: I (...) kept just the nice solid bits, thinking that I could go back and work on the wobbly portions later. (shrink)

Asked on the Dick Cavett show about her former Stalinist comrade Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy replied, "Every word she says is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'." The language used to describe sensory and perceptual consciousness is worthy of about the same level of trust. One must adapt oneself to the fact that every ordinary word used to describe this domain is ambiguous; that different theoreticians use the same words in very different ways; and that every speaker naturally thinks that (...) his or her usage is, of course, the correct one. Notice that we have already partially vindicated Mary McCarthy: even the word "the" cannot always be trusted. (shrink)

1. Clark’s book is a detailed study of the nature of sensory representation. It is highly informed by empirical results in the psychology of perception, and philosophically rich and significant. I admire the book and learned a great deal from reading it. As it covers a wide range of topics, and as I have no overarching critique to present, in this commentary I will briefly address three issues that come up in the book: Clark’s relational type-identity thesis for sensory qualities, (...) his theory that sensory representations involve proto-singular terms referring to spatio-temporal regions in the subject’s environment, and his interesting proposal concerning color to treat it as “difference coding”. Some of my remarks will be critical, but others will just explore some of the implications of his view. 2. Clark distinguishes “phenomenal properties” from “qualitative properties”, the former being appearance properties of things in the world (their colors, shapes, tastes, odors, etc.) and the latter being the properties of sensations by virtue of which they are sensations of their corresponding phenomenal properties. So when I see a red ball I am “directly” aware of the ball’s redness and roundness - it appears red and round to me. This awareness of the ball’s redness and roundness is accomplished, however, by my having a visual experience with certain qualitative properties; those that are of the sort one has when seeing something as red and round. It is these latter qualitative properties that are the subject of his relational type-identity thesis. Before addressing that thesis, however, I want to quickly note and respond to another point Clark makes concerning the qualitative properties of sensory states. He.. (shrink)

A neighbor who strikes it rich evokes both admiration and envy, and a similar mix of emotions must be aroused in many neighborhoods of cognitive science when the residents look at the results of research on color perception. It provides what is probably the most widely acknowledged success story of any domain of scientific psychology: the success, against all expectation, of the opponent process theory of color perception. Initially proposed by a Ewald Hering, a nineteenth‐century physiologist, it drew its inspiration (...) from the existence of opposing muscle groups. Hering thought that analogous opposing processes could explain some aspects of color perception, but the resulting theory was more complicated and less intuitive than that proposed by the great Hermann von Helmholtz. Helmholtz carried his day, but in the long run Hering turned out to be right. (shrink)

Hume introduced important innovations concerning the theory of ideas. The two most important are the distinction between impressions and ideas, and the use he made of the principles of association in explaining mental phenomena. Hume divided the perceptions of the mind into two classes. The members of one class, impressions, he held to have a greater degree of force and vivacity than the members of the other class, ideas. He also supposed that ideas are causally dependent copies of (...) impressions. And, unlike Locke and others, Hume makes positive use of the principle of association, both of the association of ideas, and, in a more limited way, of the association of impressions. Such associations are central to his explanations of causal reasoning, belief, the indirect passions (pride and humility, love and hatred), and sympathy. These views about impressions and ideas and the principles of association form the core of Hume’s science of human nature. Relying on them, he attempts a rigorously empirical investigation of human nature. The resulting system is a remarkable but complex achievement. (shrink)

I address this talk to anyone who believes in the possibility of an informative empirical science about sensory qualities. Potentially this is a large audience. By "sensory quality" I mean those qualities manifest in various sensory experiences: color, taste, smell, touch, pain, and so on. We should include sensory modalities humans do not share, such as electro-reception in fish, echolocation in bats, or the skylight compass in birds. Those pursuing empirical science about this large domain might pursue it in the (...) halls of experimental psychology, psycho-physics, psychometrics, psycho-physiology, sensory physiology, neuroscience, neuro-biology, comparative psychology, neuro-anatomy, and so on and on. These days even molecular genetics has kicked in with some notable recent contributions to the sequencing of genes for photopigments and for olfactory receptors. But to all those investigators in all those halls I bring bad news. Your discipline is _a priori_ impossible. Philosophers whom you do not know have uncovered _a priori_ proofs that empirical investigation which proceeds along the lines currently underway, or which will proceed along lines that are currently _imaginable_, does not, will not, and cannot explain the sensory qualities of experience. Or at least so they say. You might as well give up now. (shrink)

Recent work in experimental psychology and neuroscience has revealed a rather surprising architecture for early (or preattentive) perceptual processes. This paper will describe some of the surprising features of that architecture, and how they bear on recent philosophical debates about the notion of phenomenal consciousness. I will argue that the common sense idea that states of phenomenal consciousness are states of a unitary kind cannot survive confrontation with the details of how our early perceptual processing works. In particular, that architecture (...) forces us to contemplate the prospect of phenomenal consciousness being sundered in two, with states that have phenomenal character making an appearance far before the arrival of anything one could call consciousness or awareness. (shrink)

Oxford Philosophical Texts Series Editor: John Cottingham The Oxford Philosophical Texts series consists of authoritative teaching editions of canonical texts in the history of philosophy from the ancient world down to modern times. Each volume provides a clear, well laid out text together with a comprehensive introduction by a leading specialist, giving the student detailed critical guidance on the intellectual context of the work and the structure and philosophical importance of the main arguments. Endnotes are supplied which provide further commentary (...) on the arguments and explain unfamiliar references and terminology, and a full bibliography and index are also included. The series aims to build up a definitive corpus of key texts in the Western philosophical tradition, which will form a reliable and enduring resource for students and teachers alike. David Hume's aim in writing An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding was to introduce his philosophy to a European culture in which many educated people read original works of philosophy. He gives an elegant and accessible presentation of strikingly original and challenging views about the limited powers of human understanding, the attractions of scepticism, the compatibility of free will and determinism, and weaknesses in the foundations of religion. Hume's philosophy was highly controversial in the eighteenth century and remains so today. The text printed in this edition is that of the Clarendon critical edition of Hume's works. A substantial introduction by the editor explains the intellectual background to the work and surveys its main themes. The volume also includes detailed explanatory notes on the text, a glossary of terms, a full list of references, and a section of supplementary readings. (shrink)

David Hume's Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, first published in 1779, is one of the most influential works in the philosophy of religion and the most artful instance of philosophical dialogue since the dialogues of Plato. It presents a fictional conversation between a sceptic, an orthodox Christian, and a Newtonian theist concerning evidence for the existence of an intelligent cause of nature based on observable features of the world. This new edition presents it together with several of Hume's other, (...) shorter writings about religion, and with brief selections from the work of Pierre Bayle, who influenced both Hume's views on religion and the dialectical style of the Dialogues. The volume is completed by an introduction which sets the Dialogues in its philosophical and historical contexts. (shrink)

Tom Beauchamp presents the definitive scholarly edition of two famous works by David Hume, both originally published in 1757. In A Dissertation on the Passions Hume sets out his original view of the nature and central role of passion and emotion. The Natural History of Religion is a landmark work in the study of religion as a natural phenomenon. Authoritative critical texts are accompanied by a full array of editorial matter.