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Christopher Peacocke | |
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| Born | Christopher Arthur Bruce Peacocke (1950-05-22)22 May 1950 (age 75) |
| Awards | the Henry Wilde Prize in Philosophy (1971),Kennedy Memorial Trust |
| Education | |
| Alma mater | Magdalen College School Exeter College, Oxford Harvard University All Souls College, Oxford |
| Doctoral advisor | Michael Dummett |
| Philosophical work | |
| Era | Contemporary philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Analytic |
| Institutions | University of California, Berkeley King's College, London University of Oxford New York University Columbia University University College London New College of the Humanities |
| Doctoral students | Martin Davies |
| Main interests | Epistemology,philosophy of mind |
| Notable ideas | Theory of concept possession |
Christopher Arthur Bruce Peacocke (born 22 May 1950) is a British philosopher known for his work inphilosophy of mind andepistemology. His recent publications, in the field of epistemology, have defended a version ofrationalism.
Son of the British theologian and biochemistArthur Peacocke, he was educated atMagdalen College School, Oxford, andExeter College, Oxford, where he readphilosophy, politics and economics as an undergraduate, winning both the Webb Medley Prize in Economics andthe Henry Wilde Prize in Philosophy in 1971, and graduated with a first class degree. Later that year, he was awarded aKennedy Memorial Trust scholarship to study atHarvard University. He then continued at Oxford, gaining a BPhil (1974) and DPhil (1979) in philosophy, the latter under the supervision ofMichael Dummett. He was visiting lecturer atUniversity of California, Berkeley, 1975-6, and in 1975, elected to a fellowship atAll Souls College, Oxford. He was theSusan Stebbing Professor of Philosophy atKing's College London from 1985 to 1989 andWaynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy atOxford University from 1989 to 2000, at which time he moved toNew York University (NYU). He joined the philosophy department atColumbia University in 2004, where he is now Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy. In 2007, he was named to theRichard Wollheim chair in philosophy atUniversity College, London, where he taught in the third (summer) term each year until 2015. He lives with his wife and he has two adult children. He is also visiting professor of philosophy atNew College of the Humanities.[1][2]
Of his earlier work, he is perhaps best known for the first chapter of his 1983 book,Sense and Content, entitled "Sensation and the Content of Experience." In this chapter, Peacocke defends the claim that perceptual experience, over and above its intentional content, has certain "sensational properties". He gives three different examples of visual scenarios where intentional content alone cannot capture every aspect of the experience. Those aspects which elude intentional content are thought to be the sensational properties of the experience. Some of those who defendqualia have used these examples as evidence of their existence. Several philosophers have criticized these examples (Michael Tye,Fred Dretske), claiming that the supposed extra quality can indeed be captured in terms of intentional content.
InSense and Content, Peacocke assumed that the intentional content of mental states is exclusively conceptual content, i.e. the content is such that the subject of the state needs to possess all the concepts that specify the intentional content in question. From about 1986 and onwards, Peacocke abandoned this assumption, arguing that some mental states, in particular perceptual experiences and representational states implicated in subpersonal information processing (for example, in the subconscious parsing of heard speech), have non-conceptual intentional content. Peacocke is now often seen as a leading proponent of this notion of non-conceptual intentional content.
In his 1992 bookA Study of Concepts, Peacocke gives a detailed exposition of a philosophical theory of concept possession, according to which the nature and identity conditions for concepts may be given, in a non-circular way, by the conditions a thinker has to satisfy in order to possess the relevant concepts. The theory is a version of a so-called "conceptual" or "inferential role" theory of concepts.
