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The University of Southampton
PhilosophyPart of Humanities

Austerity and Illusion Seminar

Ceramic skull
Time:
16:00 - 18:00
Date:
7 May 2019
Venue:
Room 2115, Building 65, Avenue Campus, University of Southampton SO17 1BF

Event details

Philosophy seminar

Many contemporary theorists charge that naïve realists are incapable of accounting for illusions. To meet this charge, naïve realists venture various sophisticated proposals. Here we take a different approach and dispute whether the naïve realist owes any distinctive account of illusion. To this end, we begin with a simple, naïve account of veridical perception. We then examine the case that this account cannot be extended to illusions. By reconstructing an explicit version of this argument, we show that it depends critically on the contention that perceptual experience is diaphanous, or more minimally and precisely, that there can be no difference in phenomenal properties between two experiences without a difference in the scenes presented in those experiences. Finding no good reason to accept this claim, we conclude that the naïve realist is free to espouse a simple account of both ordinary veridical and non-veridical perception, here dubbed Simple, Austere Naïve Realism. (Joint work with Ian Phillips).

This series of seminars is sponsored by the Royal Institute of Philosophy.

Speaker information

Craig French, University of Nottingham. Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy

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