Phenomenal Presence

Many different features of the world figure consciously in our perceptual experiences, in the sense that they make a subjective difference to those experiences. These features are thought to range from colours and shapes to volumes and backsides, from natural or artifactual kinds to reasons for perceptual belief, or from the existence and externality of objects to the relationality and wakefulness of our perceptual awareness of them.

This volume explores the different ways in which features like these may be phenomenally present in perceptual experience. In particular, the focus is on features that are less often discussed, and the perceptual presence of which is more controversial or less obvious because they are out of view or otherwise easily overlooked, because they are given in a non-sensory manner, or because they are categorical in the sense that they feature in all perceptual experiences (such as their justificatory power, their wakefulness, or the externality of their objects).

The book divides into four parts, each dealing with a different kind of phenomenal presence. The first addresses the nature of the presence of perceptual constancies and variations, while the second investigates the determinacy and ubiquity of the presence of spatial properties in perception. The third part deals with the presence of hidden or occluded aspects of objects, while the last part of the volume discusses the presence of categorical aspects of perceptual experience.

Together, the contributions provide a thorough examination of which features are phenomenally present in perception, and what it is for them to figure in experience in this way.

Fabian Dorsch was Research Professor in Philosophy at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, and the Director of the EXRE Centre of Research for Mind and Normativity, where he ran two research projects: The Normative Mind and The Aesthetic Mind. The main foci of his research were interrelated issues in aesthetics, the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and the philosophy of normativity, notably meta-ethics. He published a monograph on The Unity of Imagining in 2012 (De Gruyter). He was an associate editor of the journal Dialectica and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Estetika: the Central European Journal of Aesthetics.

Fiona Macpherson is Professor and Head of Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, where she is also director of the Centre for the Study of Perceptual Experience. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Her work concerns the nature of consciousness, perception and perceptual experience, introspection, imagination and the metaphysics of mind. She has written on the nature of the senses, on cognitive penetration, and illusion and hallucination. She has published previous edited collections: Hallucination (MIT Press 2013, with Dimitris Platchais), The Senses (OUP 2011), The Admissible Contents of Experience (Wiley-Blackwell 2011, with Katherine Hawley), and Disjunctivism (OUP 2008, with Adrian Haddock).