Philosophy of Mind Workshop 2007-02-09

Justin Shaddock, "Passive Experience and the Freedom of Spontaneity"

Last night the philosophy of mind workshop met to discuss Justin Shaddock's "Passive Experience and the Freedom of Spontaneity" and the first two chapters of John Campbell's Reference and Consciousness. We started with a discussion of Justin's paper.Justin argued that there is a prima facie problem with McDowell's Kantian theory of perception. If you accept that experience is conceptual, and you accept that the conceptual necessarily involves spontaneity, and spontaneity is a form of freedom, then it looks difficult to hold on to the idea that experience is passive. Obviously, there are a couple different options you might take to relieve this tension: you can reject the idea that experience is conceptual; you can reject the idea that the conceptual essentially involves a form of freedom; or you can do what Justin does and say that there's a way to ...

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