Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
September 1, 2026
Preston Lennon
ABSTRACT Some philosophers argue that near‐term artificial intelligence (AI) systems might soon be welfare subjects. We should take AI welfare seriously, they urge, because AI systems might soon have properties indicated by our best scientific theories of consciousness, and consciousness suffices for welfare subjectivity. I argue that this view faces constraints from the epistemology of...
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
August 19, 2026
Samuel Kimpton‐Nye
In this paper, I argue that the thoroughly algorithmic nature of current AI systems (such as LLMs) is no obstacle to their being conscious, despite strong apparent reasons to the contrary. To this end, I present a picture on which algorithmic AI systems comprise dispositional properties that realize categorical phenomenal properties where the latter, in turn, provide the identity conditions for...
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
July 13, 2026
James H. McIntyre
ABSTRACT It is generally assumed that an ordinary human brain is associated with a single mind. Indeed, this assumption is so deeply rooted that it is rarely articulated explicitly, let alone questioned. However, as philosophers of mind have increasingly noticed, it turns out to rest on alarmingly shaky ground. In this article, I argue for the multiplicity hypothesis : under normal conditions,...
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
July 9, 2026
Vivian Mizrahi
ABSTRACT This article defends a provocative claim: Light itself is not seen. Proposed by Aristotle, Alhazen, and recently Hilbert and Kalderon, this view regards light as the medium of sight rather than its object. Unlike reflectance physicalism or color relationalism, this medium theory maintains that colors are entirely independent of light, which merely provides conditions for their...
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
January 14, 2026
Andrew Y. Lee, Poppy Mankowitz
1 citation
ABSTRACT Are some creatures “more conscious” than others? A number of consciousness researchers have aimed to answer this question. Yet some have claimed that this question does not even make sense. They claim that “conscious” (in the phenomenal sense) never occurs as a gradable adjective , meaning an adjective that permits degree expressions (“more f than,” “slightly f ,” etc.) and that is...
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
November 21, 2025
Peter Fisher Epstein, Umrao Sethi
ABSTRACT Empirical arguments in the philosophy of perception have become increasingly influential. In this paper, we evaluate the prospects for one such argument—the Argument from Structure —in light of the a priori constraint that we must give a unified account of visual experience. We argue that, correctly understood, the kinds of empirical findings marshalled in support of an internalist...
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
August 2, 2019
Declan Smithies
257 citations
What is the role of consciousness in our mental lives? This book argues that consciousness plays an essential role in explaining how we can acquire knowledge and epistemically justified belief about ourselves and our surroundings. On this view, our mental lives cannot be preserved in unconscious creatures—zombies—who behave just as we do. Only conscious creatures have epistemic justification to...
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
January 18, 2019
Keith Allen
14 citations
This paper develops a form of transcendental naive realism. According to naive realism, veridical perceptual experiences are essentially relational. According to transcendental naive realism, the naive realist theory of perception is not just one theory of perception amongst others, to be established as an inference to the best explanation and assessed on the basis of a cost-benefit analysis...
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
March 1, 2012
Nicholas Shea
100 citations
Block's well-known distinction between phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness has generated a large philosophical literature about putative conceptual connections between the two. The scientific literature about whether they come apart in any actual cases is rather smaller. Empirical evidence gathered to date has not settled the issue. Some put this down to a fundamental...
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
December 14, 2010
Susanna Schellenberg
71 citations
I develop a view of the common factor between subjectively indistinguishable perceptions and hallucinations that avoids analyzing experiences as involving awareness relations to abstract entities, sense‐data, or any other peculiar entities. The main thesis is that hallucinating subjects employ concepts (or analogous nonconceptual structures), namely the very same concepts that in a subjectively...
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
September 1, 1996
William Seager, Jaegwon Kim
458 citations
Jaegwon Kim is one of the most pre-eminent and most influential contributors to the philosophy of mind and metaphysics. This collection of essays presents the core of his work on supervenience and mind with two sets of postscripts especially written for the book. The essays focus on such issues as the nature of causation and events, what dependency relations other than causal relations connect...
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
September 1, 1996
Michael Tye
17 citations
David Papineau's book on naturalism is clear, level-headed, and illuminating. It is also very broad in its sweep. Papineau considers a variety of different challenges to the naturalist's position, and he tries to meet each of these challenges head-on. There is no waffling or obscurantism. My focus in this paper will be on some of the remarks Papineau makes with respect to consciousness. I am...
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
March 1, 1996
William P. Alston, Keith E. Yandell
70 citations
Introduction: is our task impossible or impolite? Part I. The Experimental Data: 1. Religious experience, 'East' and 'West' Some basic epistemological concepts Part II. The Challenge from Ineffability: 3. The outlines of ineffability ineffability relative to particular languages 5. Reasons in ineffability's favour Part III. The Social Science Challenge: 6. Nonepistemic explanation of belief 7....
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
March 1, 1996
John Bickle
14 citations
A number of influences have combined to make reductionism an unpopular position in recent philosophy of mind and psychology. Davidson's Principle of the Anomalousness of the Mental, the multiple realizability arguments of Putnam, Fodor, and others, and attempts to characterize supervenience or dependency as the appropriate nonreductive relation to seek between psychological and physical kinds...
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
March 1, 1995
Brian Garrett, John R. Searle
5 citations
As one would expect, John Searle's latest book The Rediscovery of the Mind, is a daring and controversial work. It is a blunt and lively book, as is exhibited by the title that didn't make it: What's wrong with the Philosophy of Mind? Searle's long term goal is to bring consciousness back to center stage in the philosophy of mind from the rather marginal position it currently occupies in...
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
December 1, 1994
William P. Alston
4 citations
The central thesis of the book is that experiential awareness of God-the of God, as I call it-can provide epistemic justification for certain kinds of beliefs about God. I call such beliefs 'M-beliefs' ('M' for manifestation), beliefs to the effect that God is doing something vis-a-vis the subject-strengthening, guiding, communicating a message, etc-or to the effect that God has some...
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
December 1, 1994
William P. Alston
3 citations
Both Gale and Pappas argue that I fail to justify the claim that mystical experience is perceptual. Hence, in Gale's terms, my project derailed before it leaves the station. However, the two criticisms are rather different. Gale's is the more radical, since he seeks to show that mystical experience is not even a candidate for being a source of justification for beliefs about any objective...
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
December 1, 1993
Daniel C. Dennett
117 citations
Consciousness has always been a baffling phenomenon, and some have seen it to be fundamentally mysterious, irretrievably beyond human understanding. I argue, on the contrary, that its mysteries are beginning to dissolve, thanks largely to the onslaught of empirical and conceptual advances in cognitive science. So entrenched, however, are the traditional ways of addressing the philosophical...
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
December 1, 1993
David Rosenthal, Daniel C. Dennett
11 citations
One strategy for explaining consciousness is to locate it relative to its causes and effects. Common sense seems to tell us what the causes and effects of consciousness are; so perhaps we can identify consciousness as being whatever it is that occurs in between the two. Though superficially tempting, this idea heightens the air of mystery surrounding consciousness. As far as we can tell, the...
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
December 1, 1993
Sydney Shoemaker, Daniel C. Dennett
2 citations
is so much that is brilliant, delightful, and right in Dennett's book that it is tempting try explain away, or sweep under the rug, the things that seem wrong. I was aware of one long standing disagreement between him and me, namely over the existence of But I had hoped that this was an isolated case. And, indeed, the book a whole presents a vision of mind and its place in nature (to steal C....
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
June 1, 1993
William Seager
2 citations
Like a leaky roof, the phenomena of consciousness continue to drip cold water on otherwise virtually watertight physicalist pretensions. There are no current prospects for any sort of scientific theory of consciousness and the various speculative attempts to point in the direction of such a theory of consciousness all appear to suffer from the rather basic problem of being, in the words of...
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
June 1, 1988
Panayot Butchvarov, T. L. S. Sprigge
39 citations
When Timothy Sprigge's The Vindication of Absolute Idealism appeared in 1983 it ran very much against the grain of the dominant linguistic and analytic traditions of philosophy in Britain. The very title of this work was a challenge to those who believed that Absolute Idealism fell with the critiques of Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore at the beginning of the 20th century. Sprigge, however, saw...