Our first colloquium talk this semester will take place on Friday, October 22nd (in two weeks). Our speaker will be Umrao Sethi, from Brandeis University. Her talk title and abstract are below.
Sensible Qualities and Their Instances
There is a straightforward view of perception that has not received adequate consideration because it requires us to rethink basic assumptions about the objects of perception. In this paper, I develop a novel account of these objects—the sensible qualities—which makes room for the straightforward view. I defend two primary claims. First, I argue that qualities like color and shape are “ontologically flexible” kinds. That is, their real definitions allow for both physical objects and mental entities to be colored or shaped. Second, a single instance of these qualities can be attributed to more than one entity. Just as we attribute the same instances of material properties to a statue and to the clay that constitutes it, instances of sensible qualities in perception should be attributed both to the physical objects perceived and to the sensory states that have those instances as their objects.
Here is a pre read of the paper on sensible qualities and their instructions
Email for Zoom link
