The article reviews the enactive approach to perception, which emphasizes the role of objects, the subject, and the environment in shaping the phenomenal character of perception—the qualitative dimension of experience. It begins by examining hallucination and its implications for understanding perception's phenomenal character. Then it critically explores two positions in analytic philosophy of perception: representationalism and disjunctivism. Finally, it presents enactivism as a more promising alternative.
A philosophical paper argues against Peter Carruthers' view that there is no fact of the matter about whether animals have conscious states. Carruthers combines global workspace theory with the phenomenal concept strategy to reach this skeptical conclusion. The paper presents Carruthers' theses, including his all-or-nothing view of consciousness and his distinction between qualia realism and qualia irrealism, then reconstructs his arguments against attributing consciousness to animals. It offers two arguments challenging Carruthers' position, highlighting internal contradictions. The author concludes that, contrary to Carruthers, animal consciousness deserves attention from philosophy and cognitive sciences.
A detailed reconstruction of Chalmers's two-dimensional zombie argument against materialism isolates its central assumption: that the epistemic scenario verifying the zombie hypothesis corresponds to a nonintentionally individuated metaphysical world considered as actual. The paper argues that no non-viciously circular case for this assumption has been made, rendering the two-dimensional argument at best inconclusive.
Frank Jackson's knowledge argument contends that the felt quality of sensations is characterized by qualia, intrinsic properties of conscious experiences irreducible to the physical. Qualia are the object of phenomenal knowledge, factual knowledge acquired only through experience. This paper presents a formalization showing the epistemic and metaphysical aspects of the knowledge argument and analyzes three types of objections: those denying phenomenal knowledge, those accepting phenomenal knowledge but denying it refers to non-physical properties, and those denying that all physical and functional facts can be known through physical knowledge alone. After analyzing objections and responses, the author concludes that the objections examined are not decisive against the knowledge argument.