The Varieties of Experience

The University of Glasgow Centre for the Study of Perceptual Experience is holding a conference called "The Varieties of Experience." McDowell fans interested in writing about McDowell's moral realism might reflect on the relationship of his moral realism to his conceptualism about perceptual experience.

Here's the description with Descartes's snappy rendering of vision:




"In recent years there has been renewed interest in the idea that we can talk legitimately about perceptual, or perception-like experiences, that don’t relate to any of the sensory modalities, traditionally conceived: moral experiences, aesthetic experiences and experiences of agency have all been touted as perceptual, or at least, perception-like. This renewed interest has been complemented by more general work on the nature of perceptual experience.

Under this heading, the Centre for the Study of Perceptual Experience at the University of Glasgow is holding a Graduate Conference on this subject, and we invite papers on the subject of the varieties of experience: possible topics include, but are not limited to, moral experiences and related themes in ethical intuitionism, aesthetic experiences, experiences of agency, synaesthesia and synaesthetic experiences, perceptual disorders such as blindsight, the individuation of the senses, perceptualist approaches to pain, the content and epistemological significance of moral and agentive experiences, as well as papers dealing with the nature of perceptual experience more generally."