Consciousness, Colour and Content
Graduate/Part II Seminar Lent term 2012
Wednesdays, 4.30 – 6.00
Philosophy Board Room, 3rd Floor, Raised Faculty Building, Sidgwick Site
(All graduate students and part II students welcome)
Adrian Boutel, Tim Crane & Will Davies
These seminars will examine the relationship between three things: (1) colour and colour perception; (2) conscious states and events; and (3) the representational content of mental states. An influential tradition in philosophy has treated colours as not properties of external objects but as properties of mental states or as relations between mental states and external things. A similarly influential tradition has treated consciousness in terms of intrinsic properties of mental states known as ‘qualia’, and colour properties are often taken as the paradigm examples of qualia. Intentional theories of consciousness, by contrast, treat the awareness of colour (and other properties) as the mental representation of those properties.
As well as giving an introduction to the current state of the debate on these issues, the seminars will address the relationship between the science of colour and its conscious character, the relationship between phenomenal properties (properties of conscious experience) and phenomenal concepts (concepts of those properties), and representational theories of colour consciousness. We will also incorporate talks by two guest speakers and leaders in the field, David Papineau and Mark Kalderon.
Further details and details of reading will be posted at www.timcrane.com.
Programme
25 January: Will Davies, Introduction: colour vision and the philosophy of colour
1 February: David Papineau (KCL), Can we really see a million colours?
8 February: Adrian Boutel, Introduction to theories of phenomenal concepts
15 February: Adrian Boutel, What do we know about what it's like to see red? Physicalism and the varieties of phenomenal knowledge
22 February: Will Davies, Colour Constancy, Illumination, and Perceptual Hierarchy
29 February: Mark Eli Kalderon (UCL), Noë and Colour Constancy
7 March: Tim Crane, Consciousness as Representation
14 March: Tim Crane, Consciousness, Colour and Content