As part of the ongoing MetPhil research project (Croatian Science Foundation IP-2022-10-2550), we are pleased to announce two upcoming events featuring Professor Sam Coleman from the University of Hertfordshire, United Kingdom.
Lecture
- Title: Science Answers no Questions – Why Philosophy eats Science for Breakfast
- Date: Thursday, 6.11.2025.
- Time: 12:00
- Venue: Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (room 412), Sveučilišna avenija 4, 51000 Rijeka.
Abstract:
In the olden days Aristotle called philosophy one of the sciences, indeed the highest of them. But nowadays people distinguish – or would like to distinguish – philosophy from the supposedly empirical method of science. Many people, including many philosophers, follow Locke in considering philosophy at best the handmaiden of the sciences; but some think its role is even smaller than that of clarifying concepts, since they believe that ‘experimental philosophy’ – empirical methods – can better tell us what our concepts are. Generally, there is a belief afoot in the culture that philosophy is useless and empirical science can answer all our questions, about the mind, the universe, and so on. I think this is all a colossal mistake. In fact science, as Plato seemed to see, understood as purely empirical investigation into the world, answers no questions of substance at all. Data are nothing without theory, and theory, ultimately, is a matter of philosophy. So the answers that science gives us are really a matter of the philosophy in science. I use some case studies from quantum physics and cognitive science, in particular, to support my view, which is that, roughly, science may provide the matter but philosophy constitutes the form, of our project to understand the world.
Workshop
- Title: Another Kind of Overflow – The Two Visual Streams Hypothesis, Consciousness, and Qualitative Character
- Date: Friday, 7.11.2025.
- Time: 12:00
- Venue: Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (room 412), Sveučilišna avenija 4, 51000 Rijeka.
Abstract:
Many people consider the dorsal visual stream to be a ‘zombie’: ‘merely computational’ in nature, something akin to a ‘robot’ system to which the conscious mind or visual system gives tasks (reaching, grasping) to solve, but which is utterly different in kind and content to the conscious, qualitative ventral steam – what we use to survey and describe a visual scene of colours, shapes and identifiable objects. Recently Wayne Wu has argued that, instead, and for all the empirical story tells us, the dorsal stream may instead be a case of what Ned Block has described as consciousness ‘overflowing’ cognitive access. On Wu’s hypothesis, the dorsal stream is conscious, and has phenomenal/qualitative character all of its own, only it is not introspectible, and its contents cannot be reported on – it is cognitively isolated. I suggest that a third hypothesis may well make better sense, since, among other things, it preserves the link between consciousness and introspectability: the dorsal stream is unconscious, but has qualitative character. Hence it has unconscious qualitative character. This would be an example of qualitative character overflowing consciousness, rather than consciousness overflowing cognitive access. I will suggest understanding some other alleged cases of Block-style overflow in the same way.
The workshop will provide an opportunity for in-depth discussion of the themes introduced in the lecture and for participants to engage directly with Professor Coleman.