2022 Carl G. Hempel Lecture 3: “Piercing the Veil of Appearances”

The Department of Philosophy is pleased to present the final lecture in our 2022 Carl G. Hempel Lecture series. This year’s series, entitled “Uncovering Appearances,” will be presented by Michael Martin, Wilde Professor of Mental Philosophy at the University of Oxford.

Abstract: How should we formulate the dispute between naïve realist and intentionalist conceptions of sense experience? Many take Gareth Evans’s and John McDowell’s discussions of object-dependent thought as the proper model for this. In this lecture, I argue against such approaches and explore an alternative, drawing on some passing claims by John Foster. This provides support for the claim that debates about sense experience can be disagreements about what experience is like and not just disputes about what the constitutive grounds for our experiences may be.