Oxford University Press, 2024

Perceptual Content is the first book to discuss and compare the representational characters of all the traditional "five senses". It has three main topics or concerns.

1. The diversity of the senses: though Lycan maintains as a working assumption that all perception represents, the similarity between sense modalities ends there. The senses' respective representational modes, styles and structures -- not just their mechanisms -- differ very strongly from each other.
2. The Layering thesis: Lycan argues that a single sensory representation usually has more than one content, the contents systematically related to each other by a priority or dependence relation. More specifically, a perceptual state may represent one object or property by representing a more primitive or less ambitious one; he calls this the "layering" of content. For example, by hearing a sound sequence involving such-and-such volumes and timbres, you hear a voice speaking, and by hearing the voice, you hear words in a language. In some modalities layering works unexpectedly: nearly all tactile representation derives from representation of conditions of or in the subject's own skin, meaning that touch represents, e.g., the texture of a physical object by, and only by, representing stress within the skin; and even among the skin conditions, some are represented only by representing more primitive ones.
3. Aspect perception: despite Wittgenstein's famous discussion of "seeing as" in a late section of Philosophical Investigations, little has been written on perceiving-as. Besides its intrinsic interest -- even popular appeal, what with joke ambiguous figures such as the duck-rabbit and the old/young woman -- it remains especially mysterious. Nearly all work on it has concerned vision only. But it is crucial for understanding auditory representation, which is one thing that distinguishes hearing from the other senses. Further, the auditory case severely damages what Lycan and others had thought was the best approach to understanding aspect perception, in terms of attention.

Oxford University Press, 2023

Certain combinations of sounds or signs on paper are meaningful. What makes it the case that, unlike most combinations of sounds or signs, they have meaning? What is this meaning that they have? And what is it to understand this meaning? This book advances new answers to these questions by developing inferential expressivism, a novel approach to the study of meaning which combines elements of the expressivist and inferentialist programs.

Expressivists explain the meaning of words in terms of the attitudes that words are used to express; inferentialists explain the meaning of words in terms of the inferences that words are used to draw. Reasoning with Attitude lays out the foundations of inferential expressivism by defending the view that the meaning of an expression is to be explained in terms of the inferences we draw involving the attitudes we express. As the book shows, by joining forces, expressivism and inferentialism can meet their key challenges whilst retaining their distinctive insights and advantages. Notably, inferential expressivism solves the Frege-Geach Problem plaguing expressivism, and addresses the charge that inferentialism has limited applicability. The book demonstrates the fruitfulness of the inferential expressivist approach by applying it to several open questions in semantics from different areas of inquiry, including epistemic operators and conditionals in the philosophy of language, negation and the truth predicate in the philosophy of logic, and normative vocabulary in meta-ethics.

Oxford University Press, 2023

“Moral realism” is a family of theories of morality united by the idea that there are moral facts--facts about what is right or wrong or good or bad--and that morality is not simply a matter of personal preferences, emotions, attitudes, or sociological conventions. The fundamental thought underlying moral realism can be expressed as a parity thesis. There are many kinds of facts, including physical, psychological, mathematical, temporal, and moral facts. So understood, moral realism can be distinguished from a variety of anti-realist theories including expressivism, non-cognitivism, and error theory.

The Handbook is divided into four parts, the first of which contains essays about the basic concepts and distinctions which characterize moral realism. The subsequent parts contain essays first defending the idea that morality is a naturalistic phenomenon like other subject matters studied by the empirical sciences; second, that morality is a non-natural phenomenon like logic or “pure rationality”; and the final section is dedicated to those theories which deny the usefulness of the natural/non-natural distinction. The twenty-five commissioned essays cover the field of moral realism in a comprehensive and highly accessible way.

Bloomsbury, 2023

Black Existentialism and Decolonizing Knowledge collects key philosophical writings of Lewis R. Gordon, a globally renowned scholar whose writings cover liberation struggles across the globe and make field-defining contributions to the philosophy of existence, philosophy of race, Africana philosophy, philosophy of human sciences, aesthetics, and decolonization.

Gordon's expansive output ranges across phenomenology, anti-Blackness, activist thinkers, sexuality, Fanon, Jimi Hendrix, Black Jewish struggles, critical pedagogy, psychoanalysis, and Ubuntu philosophy. Edited by Rozena Maart and Sayan Dey, two decolonial thinkers from South Africa and India, this reader shifts attention away from colonial centres of power, encouraging global dialogue across students, scholars, and activists. Featuring a foreword by the celebrated novelist and postcolonial thinker, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, this reader includes a mixture of research articles, short critical essays, reflections, interviews, poems, and photographs in the creative pursuit of liberation.