William A Sharp | Philosophy

Talks

Conference presentations

  • Joint University of Geneva and University of Neuchâtel Eidos seminar. February 2025. “Did Strawson resuscitate, or choke, common-sense realism?”
    • At this talk, I tried to leverage an interesting internal conflict in Strawson’s famous 1979 criticism of Ayer’s sense-datum theory to motivate certain deflationary conclusions about perceptual consciousness.
  • Institute of Philosophy, London Language Epistemology Metaphysics and Mind. March 2024. “How to be a naive realist at the cinema”.
    • At this talk, I argued naive realists should explain color-experiences in terms of acquaintance with objects’ reflecting beams of such and such spectral composition.
  • Boğaziçi University departmental colloquium. February 2024. “What movies, mirrors, and metamers tell us about the contents of color experience”.
    • At this talk, I argued that everyone driven to their preferred perceptual theses on the basis of experience’s transparency should accept that in being visually aware of color our visual systems represent objects as reflecting, rather than as merely disposed to reflect, beams of such and such spectral composition.
  • Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, departmental colloquium. March 2023. “Can we naturalize the perceptual representation of relational colors?”
    • At this talk, I answered the title question in the negative. The putative neural vehicles of relational color content do not carry the right sort of information about the relational colors they partly constitute.
  • University of Nottingham, Nottingham-Johannesburg joint conference, Summer 2019, “Representationalism and the stygian hues”
    • At this conference, I presented an early version of the material in my (2023) paper.
  • King’s College London–Humboldt University. History of Philosophy Conference, June 2017, “Was Descartes the Prince of the Nullibilists?”
    • At this conference, I argued the most charitable reading of Descartes’ oeuvres sees him as committed not to the mind’s nonspatiality but to its being located “wholly in the whole and wholly in each part” of subjects’ material bodies.
  • Tübingen University. Tübingen Masterclass in Theoretical Philosophy, The Philosophy of David Chalmers. January 2015. “Relevant and Irrelevant Ways of Conceiving ~Q”.
    • At this conference, I argued that the first premise of Chalmers’s conceivability argument rested on a confusion. (Spoiler: I was dead wrong.)
  • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. North Carolina Philosophical Society. March 2014. “Fosterian Psychophysics: Reply to Wong”.
    • At this conference, I tried to give interactive substance dualism its due.