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Department Colloquium: Victor Caston

Victor Caston
December 2, 2016
All Day
347 University Hall

"Aristotle on Illusions, Hallucinations, and Dreams: Is Aristotle a Direct Realist?”

 

Abstract: Aristotle has often been claimed to be some kind of direct or even naïve realist, who holds that objects are immediately present to us in perception, without the mediation of sense data, representations, or appearances. In one sense, this is surely right: what we are aware of in perception are the objects themselves and not some intermediary. But his treatment of illusions, hallucinations, and dreams shows that he would also reject disjunctivism and naïve realism, because he is committed to a common, underlying state, in virtue of which our mental states have the phenomenology they do.

Victor Caston is a Professor of Philosophy and Classical Studies at University of Michigan.