PHIL 085. Knowledge Through the Senses

Our senses seem to connect us to the world. When we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch things, we come to make judgments, like that the sky is blue, or coffee hot. But even if our sense impressions reliably correspond to sensible facts, that doesn’t explain how we know with any certainty what our senses seem to indicate. We begin with the early modern empiricists, who agreed that sense impressions give rise to ideas in the mind, but who
disagreed about the epistemic implications of this fact. Skeptics and idealists like Berkeley and Hume were pessimistic about the proposal that sense impressions are a window to knowledge of a world beyond. Direct realists, like the earlier Reid and the later McDowell, sought to reject the framework on which sensations separate us from the world. Representationalists, like Locke earlier and many others later, instead tried to bridge the divide
through ‘intentionality’-the idea that mental states can be correct or incorrect depending on whether the properties that representations ‘say’ the world has are actually properties in the world. Many still think that representations are how we have knowledge of the world. But many remain unconvinced. The urge to draw experience and world more closely together, in the pursuit of empirical knowledge, persists through the movement now called ‘New Wave Relationalism’. Having traversed the early modern period into modernity, we consider newer topics by which contemporary theorists are still trying to understand how our senses connect us to the world: hallucination, transparency, diaphaneity, justication, norms of attention, and affective valence.
PHIL distribution - L
Prerequisite: First- and second-year students must complete one introductory level PHIL course before enrolling in this course.
Humanities.
1 credit.
Spring 2026. Berinstein.
Catalog chapter: Philosophy
Department website: http://www.swarthmore.edu/philosophy

Access the class schedule to search for sections.