CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2024
| Author | Spathis, Evaggelos |
|---|---|
| Title | John McDowell and Charles Travis on Perceptual Experience: The adventure of making sense of our rational relation to the world |
| Summary | John McDowell and Charles Travis started debating over various issues concerning perception and perceptual experience in 2004. This thesis explores and considers mainly what is at issue concerning their opposed views on perceptual experience. McDowell’s views on perceptual experience are expressed chiefly in Mind and World. There he presents us with a view of perceptual experience as having propositional representational content and as being conceptually structured. Travis in his influential essay titled ‘The Silence of Senses’ criticizes various forms of representationalist theories of perception including that of McDowell. From that point on, in other later essays, their debate began to expand also on other issues regarding the idea of whether perceptual experience is something conceptual or nonconceptual and its rational role in perception, culminating on the issue of the Myth of the Given. My discussion explores these various dimensions of their debate over perceptual experience and, in the end, it focuses on the issue of the Myth of the Given. Finally, I defend McDowell against an objection of Travis concerning whether, on McDowell’s view, we perceive the particular objects of the external mind-independent reality. |
| Supervisor | Timothy Martin Crane |
| Department | Philosophy MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2024/spathis_vaggelis.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2021, Central European University