Perception: Essays After Frege

by Charles Travis

Overview

Charles Travis presents a series of connected essays on current topics in philosophy of perception. The book is informed throughout by a number of central insights of Gottlob Frege's, notably about some intrinsic differences between objects of thought and objects of perception, and about the essential publicity of thought, and hence of its objects. Travis addresses a number of key questions, including how perception can make the world bear for the perceiver on the thing for him to do or think; what it might be for there to be perceptual experiences indistinguishable from ones of perceiving (hence from experiences of one's surroundings); what it might be for things to look a certain way to the experiencer, where this is not for things to look that way; what the upshot of (sub-personal) perceptual processing might be, what sorts of capacities are drawn on in representing something as (being) something. Besides Frege, the essays owe much to J. L. Austin, something to J. M. Hinton, and more than a little to John McDowell and to Thompson Clarke. They engage critically with McDowell and with Clarke, as well as with such philosophers as Christopher Peacocke, Tyler Burge, Jerry Fodor, Elisabeth Anscombe, A. J. Ayer, and H. A. Prichard.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199676545
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	08/16/2013
Pages:	428
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Charles Travis is Professor of Philosophy at King's College London, and a researcher in the University of Porto's Institute of Philosophy, and, more specifically, the Mind, Language and Action Group. He received his doctorate from UCLA, and has taught at a number of universities in the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Scotland, and England. Besides perception he has written on philosophy of language, Wittgenstein, objectivity and the idea of forms of thought, and issues in philosophy of psychology, notably concerning propositional attitudes.

Table of Contents

Introduction1. The Silence of the Senses2. Frege, Father of Disjunctivism3. Viewing the Inner4. Reason's Reach5. The Inward Turn6. Affording us the World7. Is Seeing Intentional? 8. Unlocking the Outer World9. Desperately Seeking Psi10. The Preserve of ThinkersAppendix11. That Object of Obscure Desire12. While under the InfluenceBibliographyIndex

Editorial Reviews

"A stimulating and original contribution to many debates in contemporary philosophy of perception. Travis's rehabilitation of Fregean anti-psychologism is a welcome and timely development, and the inclusion of new and updated material makes it a worthwhile addition to the genre."—Keith A. Wilson, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

From the Publisher