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This book pursues some novel and unusual standpoints in the philosophy of action. It rejects, for example, the most widely held view about how to count actions, and argues for what it calls a ‘prolific theory’ of act individuation. It also describes and argues against the two leading theories of the nature of action, the causal theory and the agent causal theory. The causal theory cannot account for skilled activity, nor for mental action. The agent causalist theory unnecessarily reifies causings. The book identifies an assumption that they share, and that most action theorists have assumed to be unproblematic and uncontroversial, that an action is, or entails the existence of, an event. Several different meanings to that claim are disentangled and in the most interesting sense of that claim, the book denies that it is true. The book's own alternative is simple and unpretentious: nothing informative can be said about the nature of action that explicates action in any other terms. The book sketches a theory of causal explanation of action that eschews the requirement for laws or generalizations, and this effectively quashes one argument for the oft-repeated view that no explanations of action can be causal, on the grounds that there are no convincing cases of laws of human action. It addresses a number of questions about the knowledge an agent has of his own actions, looking particularly at examples of pathological cases of action in which, for one reason or another, the agent does not know what he is doing.

Animalism is the view that we are animals. After being ignored for a long time in philosophical discussions of our nature, this idea has recently gained considerable support in metaphysics and philosophy of mind. It has also, amongst philosophers, occasioned strong opposition, even though it might be said to be the view assumed by much of the scientific community. Animalism: New Essays on Persons, Animals, and Identity is the first volume to be devoted to this important topic and promises to set the agenda for the next stage in the debate. In addition to a substantial introduction by the editors, contributors to the volume include Lynne Rudder Baker, Stephan Blatti, Tim Campbell, David Hershenov, Jens Johansson, Mark Johnston, Rory Madden, Jeff McMahan, Eric Olson, Derek Parfit, Mark Reid, Denis Robinson, David Shoemaker, Sydney Shoemaker, and Paul Snowdon.

Externalism about mental content is the view that things outside of the skin or in the past are constitutive parts of present mental states. Internalism is the denial of externalism. This book propounds a plausible physicalist internalism, called qualia empiricism. Qualia empiricism is the conjunction of a modal structuralist account of perceptual experience, an account of the content contributed to thought by referring terms that deploys rigidified description clusters, and an account of non-epistemic internal resources that can bridge those first two elements. It also argues that externalism is supported by no reasons that withstand close scrutiny. These include case-based arguments and arguments entwined with externalist accounts of perceptual states and language. The book critically considers externalist arguments rooted in work by Putnam, Kripke, Burge, Millikan, Dretske, Papineau, Prinz, Fodor, Harman, Stampe, Stalnaker, Tye, Kant, Williamson, disjunctivists, Wittgenstein, Wright, Davidson, and Brandom, among others.

This book draws theoretical and philosophical lessons about perception, the nature of its objects, and sensory awareness through sustained attention to extra-visual and multisensory forms of perception and perceptual consciousness. The chapters focus on auditory perception, perception of spoken language, and multisensory perception. The first chapters concern the nature of audition’s objects, focusing on sounds and especially drawing attention to the ways in which they contrast with vision’s objects. The middle chapters explore forms of auditory perception that could not be explained without understanding audition’s interactions with other senses. This bridges work on sound perception with work on multisensory perception, and it raises multisensory perception as an important topic for understanding perception even in a single modality. It has noteworthy consequences. Not even vision can be fully understood wholly in isolation from the other senses. The last chapters are devoted to multisensory perception and perceptual consciousness. They argue that no complete account of perception overall or of multisensory perceptual consciousness can be developed in modality-specific terms—perceiving amounts to more than just seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling at the same time. The final chapter presents a new framework for understanding what it is to be modality specific or to be multisensory.

The book describes virtues of limitation management, intellectual virtues of adapting to the fact that we cannot solve many problems that we can easily describe. How to be profitably stupid. It argues that we do give one another guidance on managing our limitations, but that this has to be in terms of virtues and not of rules, and in terms of success—knowledge and accomplishment—rather than rationality. So there is the beginning of a taxonomy of intellectual virtues. These include ‘paradoxical virtues’, that sound like vices, such as the virtue of ignoring evidence and the virtue of not thinking too hard. There are also virtues of not planning ahead, ‘possibilist virtues’, in that some forms of such planning require present knowledge of one’s future knowledge that is arguably impossible. A person’s best response to many problems depends not on the most rationally promising solution to solving them but on the most likely route to success given the person’s profile of intellectual virtues and failings. This is illustrated with a discussion of several paradoxes and conundra. At the end of the book there is a discussion of intelligence and rationality that argues that both have very limited usefulness as evaluations of who will make progress on which problems.

This book develops a causal version of a compatibilist, actual-sequence view of freedom. It is a compatibilist view in that acting freely is compatible with the truth of determinism; an actual-sequence view in that acting freely is exclusively a function of actual sequences; and a causal version of such a view in that actual sequences are causal histories. On this view, acting freely is just a matter of acting from the right kinds of causes: it requires more causes instead of fewer or no causes, and it requires quite complex causes, ones that can reflect an agent’s sensitivity to reasons. The view draws heavily on the metaphysics of causation and on the relation between causation and moral responsibility. It emphasizes the role played by absence causation and other important features of the causal relation in securing the central claim that freedom is exclusively a function of actual causes.

This book collects Tyler Burge’s essays on self‐knowledge, interlocution, reasoning, and reflection. The essays use epistemology as a way of understanding underlying powers of mind. They focus on cognition that is warranted through understanding, mostly warranted non‐empirically (apriori). The relevant warrants set norms whose fulfillment reflects on powers of mind that are distinctive of persons and, on earth, distinctive of human beings.

The word ‘phenomenology’ as it occurs in the title of this book is a name for the subjective qualitative character of experience. It is widely agreed that there is such a thing as sensory phenomenology, and imagistic phenomenology. The central concern of the cognitive phenomenology debate is whether there is a distinctive ‘cognitive phenomenology’—that is, a kind of phenomenology that has cognitive or conceptual character in some sense that needs to be precisely determined. Most of the authors in this collection of essays are concerned with whether conscious thought has cognitive phenomenology, but a number of papers also consider whether cognitive phenomenology is part of conscious perception and conscious emotion. Three broad themes run through the volume. First, some authors focus on the question of how the notion of cognitive phenomenology ought to be understood. How should the notion of cognitive phenomenology be defined? Are there different kinds of cognitive phenomenology? A second theme concerns the existence of cognitive phenomenology. Some contributors defend the existence of a distinctive cognitive phenomenology, whereas others deny it. The arguments for and against the existence of cognitive phenomenology raise questions concerning the nature of first‐person knowledge of thought, the relationship between consciousness and intentionality, and the scope of the explanatory gap. A third theme concerns the implications of the cognitive phenomenology debate. What are the implications of the debate for accounts of our introspective access to conscious thought and for accounts of the very nature of conscious thought?

Physicalism entails that truths expressed in non-physical terms are redescriptions of a world specifiable in narrowly physical terms. This book argues that physicalists must therefore hold that the physical truth about the world ‘logico-conceptually’ entails the mental truth, in the sense that it is impossible for broadly logical and conceptual reasons that the former should have been true if the latter had been false. The ‘redescriptive physicalism’ based on these ideas is a fresh approach to the nature of the mental-physical connection, and the book explains why physicalists should endorse it. It must be distinguished from ‘a priori physicalism’, which Jackson and Chalmers say physicalism requires. Although physicalism does need phenomenal truths to be logico-conceptually entailed by the narrowly physical truth, the idea that they are also inferrable a priori is mistaken. On the other hand ‘a posteriori physicalism’ is too weak, and the psycho-physical identity thesis is not even sufficient for physicalism. Yet the physical-to-mental connection does not depend on analytic truths: there are holistic but non-analytic conceptual links from physical to mental descriptions, explicable by means of functionalism – which, it is argued, physicalism entails. Redescriptive physicalism is also an excellent basis for dealing with questions of mental causation. Some regard the ‘Cartesian intuitions’ as objections to these views; it is argued that they are false. As to the ‘explanatory gap’, there is an epistemic gap, but it has a physicalistically acceptable explanation.

Howell argues that the options in the debates about consciousness and the mind–body problem are more limited than many philosophers have appreciated. Unless one takes a hard-line stance, which either denies the data provided by consciousness or makes a leap of faith about future discoveries, one must admit that no objective picture of our world can be complete. Howell argues, however, that this is consistent with physicalism, contrary to received wisdom. After developing a novel, neo-Cartesian notion of the physical, followed by a careful consideration of the three major anti-materialist arguments—Black’s “Presentation Problem”, Jackson’s Knowledge Argument, and Chalmers’ Conceivability Argument—Howell proposes a “Subjective Physicalism” which gives the data of consciousness their due, while retaining the advantages of a monistic, physical ontology.

It is a commonplace that emotions can give us information about the world: we are told, for instance, that sometimes we must ‘listen to our heart’ when trying to figure out what to believe or think. But how are we to understand the positive contribution that emotions can make to our epistemic standing? And what are the conditions in which emotions make such a contribution? This book aims to answer these questions. In doing so it will illuminate a central tenet of common-sense thinking, contribute to an ongoing debate in the philosophy of emotion, and illustrate something important about the nature of emotion itself. For the thesis to be developed is that we should reject the thought that emotional experiences give us information in the same way that perceptual experiences do. The book rejects, in other words, the Perceptual Model of emotion. Instead, the epistemological story that the book tells will be grounded in a novel and distinctive account of what emotions are and what emotions do. On this account, emotions help to serve our epistemic needs by capturing our attention, and by facilitating a reassessment or reappraisal of the evaluative information that emotions themselves provide. As a result, emotions can promote understanding of and insight into ourselves and our evaluative landscape.

These chapters in this book were written to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Wilfrid Sellars's essay ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’, a landmark of 20th-century philosophy. Ranging widely through Sellars's oeuvre, the chapters are both appreciative and critical of Sellars's accomplishment. Their topics include the standing of empiricism in Sellars's philosophy, Sellars's theory of perception, his dissatisfaction with both foundationalist and coherentist epistemologies, his critique of idealism and commitment to realism, his conception of picturing, and the status of the normative (both the ‘logical space of reasons’ and the ‘manifest image’) in a broadly naturalistic form of scientific realism. These chapters show how vibrant Sellarsian philosophy remains in the 21st century.

This book is a collection of 14 essays; 11 of these have been previously published and three are new. All but one of them have been written since 1993 when my essay collection Supervenience and Mind appeared. Essays used in the monographs, Mind in a Physical World and Physicalism, Or Something Near Enough, have been excluded. The book begins with four essays on emergence and related issues; in one way or another, each of these essays raises difficulties for the idea of emergence. In particular, the last essay casts serious doubt on the intelligibility of the very idea of ontological emergence (distinguished from epistemological emergence). These essays are followed by two essays on explanation of action. Both stress the centrality and priority of the agent's first‐person point of view in understanding actions. The second of the two, which is new, develops an agent‐centered normative account of action explanation, in opposition to the prevailing third‐person approaches such as the causal and nomological models. The next group of four essays addresses various issues about explanation, such as explanatory realism, explanatory exclusion, reduction and reductive explanation, and what a philosophical theory of explanation should be like. Mental causation and physicalism are the concerns of the next three papers. One of these examines Donald Davidson's defense of mental causation within his anomalous monism. Another discusses Sydney Shoemaker's recent analysis of realization (the “subset view”) and his defense of mental causation. The last essay of the book addresses the issue of laws in the special sciences, offering three arguments to show that there are no such laws. The first begins with a consideration of Davidson's argument for the claim that there are no strict laws about the mental; the second builds on J.J.C. Smart's observations on biology and its relation to physics; and the third is based on my earlier work on multiple realization.

This book is a collection of important work on the problem of scepticism, by someone who has provided perhaps the leading contemporary investigation of this problem. The guiding questions of this volume are: Can we have knowledge of the external world of things outside our minds? Can we have knowledge of the internal world of our own contentful mental states? The work divides into four sections: I. Transcendental Arguments against Scepticism, II. Semantic Answers to Scepticism, III. Self-knowledge, and IV. Scepticism and Epistemic Closure.

Someone who has more sympathy with traditional empiricism than with much of present-day philosophy may ask himself: ‘How do my experiences give rise to my beliefs about an external world, and to what extent do they justify them?’ He wants to refer, among other things, to unremarkable experiences, of a sort which he cannot help believing to be so extremely common that it would be ridiculous to call them common experiences. He mainly has in mind sense-experiences, and he thinks of them in a particular way. His way of thinking of them, roughly speaking as something ‘inner’, is one on which recent logico-linguistic philosophy has thrown a good deal of light. The relevant special notion of an experience contrasts, among other things, with a certain more general biographical notion of an experience, which some dictionaries indicate by the definition, ‘an event of which one is the subject’. This book explores the concept of experiences, focusing on the disjunctions between perception and illusion.

Our engagement with time is a ubiquitous feature of our lives. We are aware of time on many scales, from the briefest flicker of change to the way our lives unfold over many years. But to what extent does this encounter reveal the true nature of temporal reality? To the extent that temporal reality is as it seems, how do we come to be aware of it? And to the extent that temporal reality is not as it seems, why does it seem that way? These are the central questions addressed by this book. These questions take on a particular importance in philosophy for two reasons. Firstly, there is a view concerning the metaphysics of time, known as the B-theory, according to which the apparently dynamic quality of change, the special status of the present and even the passage of time are all illusions. Instead, the world is a four-dimensional space-time block, lacking any of the apparent dynamic features of time. If the B-theory is correct, as the book argues, then it must be explained why our experiences seem to tell us otherwise. Secondly, experiences of temporal phenomena such as changes, rates and durations are of independent interest because of certain puzzles that they raise, the solutions to which may shed light on broader issues in the philosophy of mind. The book presupposes only a general philosophical background; specific issues in the metaphysics of time and the philosophy of mind are introduced as the argument progresses.

One of the most important research programs in contemporary cognitive science is that of extended cognition. In this area of study, features of a subject’s cognitive environment can, in certain conditions, become constituent parts of the cognitive process itself. The aim of this volume is to explore the epistemological ramifications of this idea. The book brings together papers written by a range of distinguished and emerging academics, from a variety of different perspectives, to investigate the very idea of an extended epistemology. The first part of the volume explores foundational issues with regard to an extended epistemology as well as from a critical perspective. The second part of the volume examines the applications of this idea, and the new theoretical directions that it might take us. These include the relevance of Chinese philosophy, the ethical ramifications of extended epistemology, and its import to the epistemology of education, moral ethics, and emerging digital technologies.

There are many senses in which we can be said to be free agents, and to be morally responsible. There is also, however, a strong, fundamental, and natural sense in which these things are impossible. Very briefly: we cannot be ultimately responsible for how we act. Why not? Because when we act, we do what we do because of the way we are, all things considered, and we cannot be ultimately responsible for the way we are. Suppose this is right: ultimate responsibility is impossible. Can we nevertheless state what would be necessary and sufficient for someone to possess ultimate responsibility (as we can state the necessary and sufficiently conditions of being a round square)? One proposal is that one would have to be causa sui, truly, ultimately the cause or source of oneself, at least in fundamental mental or characteral respects. Another proposal considered in this book is that one could not really count as a free agent (even if one was somehow causa sui) unless one also experienced oneself as, or believed oneself to be, a free agent. This raises the question whether believing something to be the case could ever be a condition of its actually being the case (the idea is highly paradoxical). It also leads to a sustained discussion of the experience of agency, and of being a free agent. Generally speaking, the metaphysical possibilities seem fairly clear when it comes to the question of free will. The remaining questions of interest may have more to do with the phenomenology of freedom, and more generally, moral psychology.

What is given to us in conscious experience? The Given is an attempt to answer this question and in this way contribute to a general theory of mental content. The content of conscious experience is understood to be absolutely everything that is given to one, experientially, in the having of an experience. The book focuses on the analysis of conscious perception, conscious emotion, and conscious thought, and deploys three fundamental notions in addition to the fundamental notion of content: the notions of intentionality, phenomenology, and consciousness. The author argues that all experience essentially involves all four things, and that the key to an adequate general theory of what is given in experience—of ‘the given’—lies in giving a correct specification of the nature of these four things and the relations between them. She argues that conscious perception, conscious thought, and conscious emotion each have a distinctive, irreducible kind of phenomenology—what she calls ‘sensory phenomenology’, ‘cognitive phenomenology’, and ‘evaluative phenomenology’ respectively—and that these kinds of phenomenology are essential in accounting for the intentionality of these mental phenomena.