Introduction Over the last quarter of the twentieth century, an orthodoxy of sorts had gelled in the philosophy of mind around a kind of psychological externalism, the idea that some mental states individuate sensitively to extra-cranial factors. More recently, two trends of thought have departed from this young orthodoxy in opposite directions. On the one hand, a cluster of ideas captured in s...

In 1956, W.B. Gallie introduced his idea of essentially contested concepts. In my paper, I offer a novel interpretation of his theory and argue that his theory, thus interpreted, is correct. The key to my interpretation lies in a condition Gallie places on essentially contested concepts that other interpreters downplay or dismiss: that the use of an essentially contested concept must be derived...

In 1903 G.E. Moore celebrated a robust nonnaturalistic form of moral realism with the publication of his Principia Ethica. Subsequent years have witnessed the development and refinement of a number of views motivated at least in part by a deep resistance to the metaphysical and epistemological commitments of nonnaturalism. Over time, Moore’s view arguably has become the position of last resort ...

One reason philosophers have addressed the metaphysics of color is its apparent relevance to the sciences concerned with color phenomena. In the light of such thinking, this paper examines a pairing of views that has received much attention: color physicalism and externalism about the content of perceptual experience. It is argued that the latter is a dubious conception of the workings of our p...

This paper argues that transcendental phenomenology (here represented by Edmund Husserl) can accommodate the main thesis of semantic externalism, namely, that intentional content is not simply a matter of what is ‘in the head,’ but depends on how the world is. I first introduce the semantic problem as an issue of how linguistic tokens or mental states can have ‘content’—that is, how they can se...

Consciousness is not only a philosophical but also a technological issue, since a conscious agent has evolutionary advantages. Thus, to replicate a biological level of intelligence in a machine, concepts of machine consciousness have to be considered. The widespread internalistic assumption that humans do not experience the world as it is, but through an internal ‘3D virtual reality model’, hin...