Wednesday,
August 18, 2004
COLORS
AND SOUNDS
Philosophy
321C
Fall 2004
Tuesday
7:30pm - 10:30pm, Pettingill 151
Casey
O'Callaghan
http://www.bates.edu/~cocallag/
207.786.6308
73/75
Campus Avenue, Room 3
Traditionally, philosophical thought about perception and consciousness has focused primarily on vision--in particular, on color and color experience. Philosophers interested in the nature and content of experience, however, have much to learn through attention to the distinctive features of other sensory modalities and the things we perceive through them. In this seminar, we examine what colors are, what sorts of things are colored, and the relationship between colors and our experiences of them. We then investigate the nature of sounds and of auditory experience, and address the questions associated with developing a philosophical theory of auditory perception. Prerequisite: 211 or 232 or 234 or 235 or 236 or 245 or 272 or 274.
Texts:
1. Readings on Color, Volume 1: The Philosophy of Color [C], edited by Alex Byrne and David Hilbert (MIT, 1997). A recent collection of papers on color
and color perception. Many of the
readings from the first part of the course are drawn from this.
2. Color for Philosophers: Unweaving the Rainbow [UR], C.L. Hardin (Hackett, 1988) We'll discuss selections from this
monograph throughout the term, but you should be reading through it in
conjunction with the course.
Recommended Resources:
1. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Color": http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/color/
2. David Hilbert, Color and Color Perception: A Study in Anthropocentric Realism
3. Byrne and Hilbert, Volume 2: The Science of Color
4. Evan Thompson, Color Vision
5. Michael Tye, Color, Consciousness, and Content
6. Barry Stroud, The Quest for Reality: Subjectivism and the
Metaphysics of Colour
1. Weekly discussion pieces (all 10 needed
to pass): 1/5
2. Attendance, participation, and
presentations (2-3 each): 1/5
3. Midterm paper (8 pages) or exam: 1/5
4. Final paper (8-10 pages) or exam: 2/5
Part
I: The Metaphysics and Perception
of Color
Week
1: Preliminaries and Background
Danto,
Forward to Hardin's Color for Philosophers
Week
2: Color Science and the
Philosophy of Color
Hilbert,
Chapter 1, "Conceptions of Color"
Hardin,
Chapter 1, "Color Perception and Science" [UR]
Thompson, Chapter 1, "The Received View"
Nassau, "The Causes of Color"
Week
3: Colors as Physical Properties
Smart,
"On Some Criticisms of a Physicalist Theory of Colors" [C]
Byrne and
Hilbert, "Colors and Reflectances" [C]
Byrne
and Hilbert, "Introduction" [C]
Armstrong, "Smart and the Secondary Qualities" [C]
Week
4: Colors as Dispositions
Johnston,
"How to Speak of the Colors" and "Postscript: Visual
Experience" [C]
Byrne,
"Colors and Dispositions"
Week
5: Are There Any Colors? Are
Colors in the Head?
Hardin,
Chapter 2, "The Ontology of Color" [UR]
Boghossian
and Velleman, "Color as a Secondary Quality" [C]
Recommended
Hardin,
Chapter 3, "Phenomenology and Physiology" [UR] (esp. to p. 154)
Jackson, "Epiphenomenal Qualia"
Shoemaker, "The Inverted
Spectrum"
Week
6: Colors as Simple
Properties
Campbell,
"A Simple View of Color" [C]
Broakes,
"The Autonomy of Color" [C]
Recommended
Johnston,
"The Manifest" sections "Colors as Qualities" and
"Hylomorphism"
Watkins, selections
Yablo, "Singling out Properties," Philosophical
Perspectives 9 (1995)
Batty, "Naïve Color"
Week
7: Introduction; Sound Science;
Phenomenology of Auditory Experience
Selections
from Bregman, Blauert, and Zwicker & Fastl
"The
Locations of Sounds"
O'Shaughnessy,
selections from Consciousness and the World
Nudds,
"Experiencing the Production of Sounds"
Week
8: Three Theories of Sound
Pasnau,
"What is Sound?"
O'Callaghan,
"Sounds and Events" and "What is the Wave Conception of
Sounds?"
Week
9: Echoes
Week
10: Audible Qualities
Week
11: Other Modalities; Perceptual
Theorizing across the Modalities
Week
12: Conclusions.