Keith Wilson

I am a full-time doctoral student at the University of Warwick studying the philosophy of mind and perception. I have a First Class BA (Hons.) with Distinction in Philosophy from the University of York and an MLitt in Philosophy with Distinction from the University of St Andrews and Stirling Graduate Programme (SASP), and also recently worked under the supervision of Professor Christopher Peacocke at Columbia University, New York.

Department: Philosophy
Supervisors: Bill Brewer, Matt Soteriou
Thesis Title: Representational Content in Perceptual Experience
Funding: AHRC / University of Warwick PhD Fellowship
Year Started: 2008, Expected Submission: 2012

Doctoral Thesis

My research concerns the role of representational content in perceptual experience. In particular, I examine a series of arguments arising from Charles Travis’s ‘The Silence of Senses’ in favour of a non-representational account of perceptual experience.

My thesis is that there are some accounts of representational content which are able to escape Travis’s arguments. However, they do so only by positing the kind of substantive relation between subject and object that non-representationalists hold to be essential to perceptual experience. Thus, I argue, there is room for a third position which claims both that there is a (potentially object-involving) perceptual relation and that perceptual experience has representational content, but that the nature of perceptual experience is not fully captured by its content alone.

These two positions—namely, representationalism and relationism—are often (mistakenly, in my view) taken to be fundamentally opposed to one another by participants in this debate, many of whom appear to be talking at cross purposes. I therefore hope to shed light upon precisely what the various areas of disagreement (or agreement) between the two camps are, and why certain apparently plausible accounts of perceptual content must be rejected.

Other Interests

My other research interests include various topics in the philosophy of mind and perception, epistemology, embodied mind and cognition, the metaphysics and consciousness of time and temporal passage, and the works of Thomas Reid and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

When I’m not studying philosophy I enjoy listening to and playing music (I used to work as a sound engineer and play guitar, keyboards and have occasionally been known to sing), computer programming and web site design, photography, reading, film, yoga, travel, and exploring the British countryside.

Curriculum Vitae