Adam Pautz – författare

New essays on the philosophy of Ned Block, with substantive and wide-ranging responses by Block.

Perhaps more than any other philosopher of mind, Ned Block synthesizes philosophical and scientific approaches to the mind; he is unique in moving back and forth across this divide, doing so with creativity and intensity. Over the course of his career, Block has made groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of intelligence, representation, and consciousness. Blockheads! (the title refers to Block''s imaginary counterexample to the Turing test—and to the Block-enthusiast contributors) offers eighteen new essays on Block''s work along with substantive and wide-ranging replies by Block. The essays and responses not only address Block''s past contributions but are rich with new ideas and argument. They importantly clarify many key elements of Block''s work, including his pessimism concerning such thought experiments as Commander Data and the Nation of China; his more general pessimism about intuitions and introspection in the philosophy of mind; the empirical case for an antifunctionalist, biological theory of phenomenal consciousness; the fading qualia problem for a biological theory; the link between phenomenal consciousness and representation (especially spatial representation); and the reducibility of phenomenal representation. Many of the contributors to Blockheads! are prominent philosophers themselves, including Tyler Burge, David Chalmers, Frank Jackson, and Hilary Putnam.

ContributorsNed Block, Bill Brewer, Richard Brown, Tyler Burge, Marisa Carrasco, David Chalmers, Frank Jackson, Hakwan Lau, Geoffrey Lee, Janet Levin, Joseph Levine, William G. Lycan, Brian P. McLaughlin, Adam Pautz, Hilary Putnam, Sydney Shoemaker, Susanna Siegel, Nicholas Silins, Daniel Stoljar, Michael Tye, Sebastian Watzl

Perception is one of the most pervasive and puzzling problems in philosophy, generating a great deal of attention and controversy in philosophy of mind, psychology and metaphysics. If perceptual illusion and hallucination are possible, how can perception be what it intuitively seems to be, a direct and immediate access to reality? How can perception be both internally dependent and externally directed?

Perception is an outstanding introduction to this fundamental topic, covering both the perennial and recent work on the problem. Adam Pautz examines four of the most important theories of perception: the sense datum view; the internal physical state view; the representational view; and naïve realism, assessing each in turn. He also discusses the relationship between perception and the physical world and the issue of whether reality is as it appears.

Useful examples are included throughout the book to illustrate the puzzles of perception, including hallucinations, illusions, the laws of appearance, blindsight, and neuroscientific explanations of our experience of pain, smell and color. The book covers both traditional philosophical arguments and more recent empirical arguments deriving from research in psychophysics and neuroscience.

The addition of chapter summaries, suggestions for further reading and a glossary of terms make Perception essential reading for anyone studying the topic in detail, as well as for students of philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology and metaphysics.