Graduate students and postdocs are encouraged to join the speaker for lunch after the seminar. To sign up for a spot, please email: pennmindcore@sas.upenn.edu 

Jacob Beck
York Research Chair, Philosophy of Visual Perception
Department of Philosophy
York University

Resurrecting a Primary–Secondary Quality Distinction

In the 17th century, thinkers such as Galileo, Boyle, and Locke distinguished primary qualities, such as size, shape, number, and motion, from secondary qualities, such as color, sound, odor, and taste. This distinction played a key role in the scientific revolution. Even so, it was immediately mocked by Berkeley and has been recurrently critiqued ever since. Where does that leave us today? Are there grounds to accept a primary–secondary quality distinction in anything like the early modern sense? I’ll argue that there are. Although the distinction I’ll develop is anachronistic — it is grounded in contemporary perception science and is not intended as a serious interpretation of early modern texts — it is extensionally close to the early modern distinction and respects several core features of early modern accounts. The upshot is that size, shape, number, and motion really are unlike color, sound, odor, and taste; but for different reasons than the early moderns thought. 

A pizza lunch will be served. Please bring your own beverage.

We will also stream this seminar via Zoom.
For the link, please email: pennmindcore@sas.upenn.edu