1st Edition

Disjunctivism Disjunctive Accounts in Epistemology and in the Philosophy of Perception

Edited By Marcus Willaschek Copyright 2013

    Does perception provide us with direct and unmediated access to the world around us? The so-called 'argument from illusion ' has traditionally been supposed to show otherwise: from the subject's point of view, perceptual illusions are often indistinguishable from veridical perceptions; hence, perceptual experience, as such, cannot provide us with knowledge of the world, but only with knowledge of how things appear to us. Disjunctive accounts of perceptual experience, first proposed by John McDowell and Paul Snowdon in the early 1980s and at the centre of current debates in the philosophy of perception, have been proposed to block this argument. According to the traditional view, a case of perception and a subjectively indistinguishable illusion or hallucination can exemplify what is fundamentally the same kind of mental state even though they differ in how they relate to the non-mental environment. In contrast, according to the disjunctive account, the concept of perceptual experience should be seen as essentially disjunctive, encompassing (at least) two distinct kinds of mental states, namely genuinely world-involving perceptions and mere appearances.

    This book presents seven recent essays on disjunctivism first published in two special issues of Philosophical Explorations: An International Journal for the Philosophy of Mind and Action.

    Introduction Marcus Willaschek, Institute for Philosophy, University of Frankfurt, Germany

    1. Transparancy and imagining seeing Fabian Dorsch, Department of Philosophy, University of California Berkeley, USA

    2. Naïve realism and extreme Disjunctivism M.D. Conduct, Department of Philosophy, Durham University, UK

    3. Perceiving events Matthew Soteriou, Department of Philosophy, University of Warwick, UK

    4. Tyler Burge on disjunctivism John McDowell, Department of Philosophy, University of Pittsburg, USA

    5. Disjunctivism and the urgency of scepticism Søren Overgaard, Danish National Research Foundation: Centre for Subjectivity Research, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

    6. The disjunctive conception of perceiving Adrian Haddock, Department of Philosophy, University of Stirling, UK

    7. Disjunctivism Again Tyler Burge, University of California Los Angeles, USA

    Biography

    Marcus Willaschek is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Frankfurt am Main, Germany. He has published numerous articles on the philosophy of Kant, and on topics in the philosophy of action, free will and epistemology. He was an editor for the journal Philosophical Explorations from 2005-2010.