Special Lecture

Speaker: Ian Phillips (Bloomberg Distinguished Professor, Johns Hopkins University)
Title: The silence of temporal experience. 
 
A repeated refrain in discussions of the metaphysics of time is that we have something to learn by studying our experience of and in time. This marks a notable contrast with other aspects of the physical world. Few think we should study experience to learn about mass, energy or charge. More striking still is the widespread disagreement as to what experience teaches--disagreement which can naturally foster scepticism about introspection. Through a series of case studies, I'll argue that reflection on experience in fact has nothing distinctive to teach about the metaphysics of time. At best such reflection provides instances of more general phenomena which might be thought to trouble different views. 
 
Title: Action and experience
 
According to a traditional perspective, only stimuli which are consciously experienced can initiate or guide genuinely intentional action. This view has been disputed on a wide-range of empirical grounds. The most striking alleged counter-examples come from individuals with brain damage who appear to exhibit preserved capacities for intentional agency in the absence of relevant experience (e.g. Weiskrantz 1998, de Gelder 2008, Milner and Goodale 2006, 2008). Through detailed discussion of blindsight and visual form agnosia, I explore and develop a quite different account on which putative action/awareness dissociations arise from severely and selectively degraded but nonetheless conscious vision.