Color and Perception For color, to be is to be perceived: not so for shape. That was a central tenet of the modern philosophers. Color depends on perceivers for its existence, but shape does not. Thus it makes no sense to suppose that colors exist in a possible world and yet no […]
Object Mentalism and Philosophy What impact would the truth of object mentalism have on the philosophical landscape? For expository reasons I shall speak as if it is true, though we could also conjure a possible world in which it is stipulated to be true and consider philosophy as it exists in that world. […]
Earth Mind Let’s suppose that object mentalism is true—the doctrine that every object has a mental life. I mean this doctrine as derived from the thesis that all secondary qualities need a psychological subject: since such qualities are mental they must be perceived, so everything having them is a perceiver of some sort. [1] […]
Secondary Qualities and Possible Worlds Consider a possible world in which all objects have minds, indeed selves: every physical object is a subject of consciousness. In this world every object has a brain, though the brains might not be very like the brains we are familiar with. Thus trees, rivers, mountains, post boxes, […]
Color and Object I am going to give a list of reasons for supposing (a) that colors are mental and (b) that colors are in external objects. None of them is apodictic but they provide a powerful prima facie case, which I think is supported by common sense. As to (a) […]
Mind in World I am going to describe a chain of reasoning that begins with commonsense premises and ends with a startling conclusion. It is prompted by some remarks of Berkeley concerning the instantiation of mental properties: “Now for an idea to exist in an unperceiving thing, is a manifest contradiction; for […]
Matter and God Berkeley’s philosophy is built around the idea that matter and God are inconsistent with each other so we need to remove matter from our metaphysical view. The reason for this is that matter encourages skepticism, both about the external world and about God himself. If the world consists of […]
Is Matter Intelligible? Matter has long been felt to be problematic. Berkeley thought it unintelligible, mainly on account of its causal inertness. Russell found it suspiciously akin to old-fashioned substance, replacing it with events and neutral (i.e. mental) stuff. The positivists suspected it of the crime of metaphysics and declared it meaningless. It […]
A Private World We live in a mixed world: partly public, partly private. There are public perceptible states of affairs and there are private imperceptible states of affairs—for example, rocks and animals, on the one hand, and thoughts and sensations, on the other. You can see the color of your cat’s eyes […]
[3] It may be that the organism-centered view of evolution is a holdover from religious views of the origin of life. If we think of God as our creator, we naturally picture him as especially concerned with our welfare, particularly our life and death. By extension, then, we imagine him concerned with the individual lives […]