So I hear Douwe Draaisma say—in an interview on television—that we have many kinds of memory, at least one per sense organ and then a lot more of them. (I like that model). And he defines memory as anything we retain from the past to deal with the present. (I like that definition). And he…

…Phenomenology is martial art for philosophers… Imagine this: you are the only person in the world who moves in slow motion. You have no clue about this (of course you don’t), but everyone else can see it happening. So imagine a world where people see one person moving in slow motion, and that one person…

We perceive a chair as that thing out there, which allows us to sit on it, or to pick it up and move it a bit, etc. It is us who add the practical structuring, but it is the chair which adds the affordances, i.e. the actual or anticipated (or remembered) affordance: things the members…

Recently, I developed this “argument from reunions”: People, when visiting reunions, say, of a High School class, notice how they fall back in their old roles. That is how we express the experience. But why does this happen? According to my view on how we farm out our perceptions to the things and events perceived…

I simply love Currie’s assumption that the real precedes the represented, but object to his use of it. In Image and Mind, he argues that fictional entities because they are non-existent cannot be represented photographically. “A fiction does not have the kinds of properties—shape, size, colour—that could be represented pictorially.” (p. 12). I have called…

Put on a mask and you should find that your expectations will change. You’ll typically expect others to look for clues about who you are, and, when none are found, a hesitancy to communicate with you, perhaps only on instrumental grounds. Did you just tell you’d go shopping for them, then they would typically want…

We think perception is reception (of data from the outside world, or impressions), but tell me: How do we know this? Is their an introspective manner for us to establish this fact? How much of what one perceives comes unsuspected? Not much, does it? Much of what we perceive conforms to our expectations. How often…

One of the assets of Claude lanzmann’s film Shoah is this that it presents moral witnesses in places that are sure to stir their memories. Lanzmann did not invite them over to the studio for an interview, nor did he visit them in their own homes. The relevant places are either historical sites (the camps;…

The wisdom in the way our parents lived, and the speciesism therein: they might think of other people first as members of this or that family, and then, perhaps, also, as ugly, or beautiful. They would simply assume that since these people had parents, so they would if not soon then eventually find a partner…

Of course, we don’t have to believe along with the believers that Gods, wizzards and witches are real entities. It’s pretty clear that neither they nor their working can be perceived polymodally, and thus they cannot be proven real—so we can at the least remain agnosticist (no need for militant atheism). Gods, wizzards, and witches,…