Essays on Perceptual Experience

A central figure in Anglo-American philosophy for over four decades, Paul F. Snowdon made seminal contributions to the fields of metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and the history of twentieth-century philosophy. Snowdon’s work on perception and perceptual experience--much of which is collected in this volume for the first time--was particularly influential and firmly established ’disjunctivism’ as a view with which any theorist working in the field must reckon.

In the essays collected in the first part of this volume, Snowdon traces the contours of the concept of perception, refining his formulation of the disjunctivist position, determining the degree of involvement of the concept of causation, and engaging critically with arguments which aim to support sense-data theories. The second part contains critical examinations of the views propounded by several influential philosophers, amounting to a partial sketch of the history of twentieth-century philosophy of perception. Among the figures whose work Snowdon engages are J. L. Austin, A. J. Ayer, Michael Ayers, Michael Hinton, John McDowell, G. E. Moore, H. H. Price, Wilfrid Sellars, P. F. Strawson, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

The volume opens with a robust and intellectually generous introduction in which Snowdon describes the theoretical challenges, approaches, and themes that animate the set of interrelated problems addressed across all sixteen essays. Sprinkled throughout are an array of candid reflections that serve to illuminate both the substantive connections between the essays as well as the historical and circumstantial contexts that occasioned their writing.

Paul F. Snowdon

Paul F. Snowdon (1946-2022) read Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at University College, Oxford, and remained there for the BPhil. He was appointed a lecturer in philosophy at Reading University in 1970, and became a Fellow and Lecturer in Philosophy at Exeter College, Oxford the following year. From 2001 until his retirement in 2015, he was Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at University College London. Snowdon served as President of the Aristotelian Society and held visiting posts at the Australian National University (Australia), Umea University (Sweden), the University of Otago (New Zealand), and Williams College (USA).

Stephan Blatti is Director of University Honors and Affiliate Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maryland. Before coming to Maryland, he was Chair and Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis, where he also served as Director of the Marcus W. Orr Center for the Humanities and Editor of The Southern Journal of Philosophy. He previously held appointments at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Blatti received a BPhil and DPhil from the University of Oxford (under the supervision of Paul Snowdon) and a BA from Ohio State University.