The Philosophical Quarterly
June 12, 2025
Christian List
Abstract In this paper, I argue that no theory of consciousness can simultaneously respect four initially plausible metaphysical claims—namely ‘first-person realism’, ‘non-solipsism’, ‘non-fragmentation’, and ‘one world’—but that any three of the four claims are mutually consistent. So, theories of consciousness face a ‘quadrilemma’. Since it will be hard to achieve a consensus on which of the...
The Philosophical Quarterly
February 3, 2025
Matthew Fulkerson, Jonathan Cohen
Abstract Phenomenal Contrast Arguments (PCAs) are a prominent method in philosophy of mind for, among other uses, investigating how specific mental features shape the phenomenal character of experience. This paper identifies a general and underexplored obstacle to the success of PCAs: The necessity of demonstrating that the contrasts employed in these arguments are genuinely phenomenal, rather...
The Philosophical Quarterly
November 11, 2024
Robert G. Cowan
Abstract Lucid dreams are a distinctive and intriguing phenomenon where subjects apparently possess, inter alia, conscious knowledge that they are dreaming while they are dreaming. I here develop and defend a new model of lucid dreaming, what I call the ‘Dyadic Model’, according to which lucid dreams involve the tokening of both dreaming and non-dreaming states. The model is developed to...
The Philosophical Quarterly
October 22, 2024
Marcelino Botin
Abstract The meta-problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining why we believe that there is a hard problem of consciousness. A solution to the former promises to take us one step closer to solving the latter. While many hope for a physicalist realist solution to the meta-problem, I argue that the two prominent physicalist realist positions in the literature, orthodox Russellian and...
The Philosophical Quarterly
January 30, 2017
Travis Timmerman
29 citations
John Martin Fischer and Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin's book is the gold standard for philosophical work aimed at a popular audience. Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin make nuanced, philosophically interesting arguments about a topic largely unexplored by academic philosophers and manage to do so in a way that is accessible to any intellectually curious reader. The central aim of the book is to consider...
The Philosophical Quarterly
April 6, 2011
Boyd Millar
7 citations
The consensus in contemporary philosophy of mind is that how a perceptual experience represents the world to be is built into its sensory phenomenology. I defend an opposing view which I call ‘moderate separatism’, that an experience's sensory phenomenology does not determine how it represents the world to be. I argue for moderate separatism by pointing to two ordinary experiences which...
The Philosophical Quarterly
December 17, 2010
Dan Cavedon‐Taylor
6 citations
I distinguish between two kinds of sensorimotor expectations: agent‐ and object‐active ones. Alva Noë's answer to the problem of how perception acquires volumetric content illicitly privileges agent‐active expectations over object‐active expectations, though the two are explanatorily on a par. Considerations which Noë draws upon concerning how organisms may ‘off‐load’ internal processes onto...
The Philosophical Quarterly
August 3, 2010
Richard Gray, Alessandra Tanesini
7 citations
Traditional accounts of perception endorse an input–output model: perception is the input from world to mind and action is the output from mind to world. In contrast, enactive accounts propose action to be constitutive of perception. We focus on Noë's sensorimotor version of enactivism, with the aim of clarifying the proper limits of enactivism more generally. Having explained Noë's particular...