Beyond Vision: Philosophical Essays

Casey O’Callaghan

Beyond Vision brings together eight essays by Casey O’Callaghan. The works draw theoretical and philosophical lessons about perception, the nature of its objects, and sensory awareness through sustained attention to extra-visual and multisensory forms of perception and perceptual consciousness. O’Callaghan focuses on auditory perception, perception of spoken language, and multisensory perception. The first essays concern the nature of audition’s objects, focusing on sounds, especially drawing attention to the ways in which they contrast with vision’s objects. The middle essays explore forms of auditory perception that could not be explained without understanding audition’s interactions with other senses. This bridges work on sound perception with work on multisensory perception, and it raises multisensory perception as an important topic for understanding perception even in a single modality. The last essays are devoted to multisensory perception and perceptual consciousness. They argue that no complete account of perception overall or of multisensory perceptual consciousness can be developed in modality-specific terms-perceiving amounts to more than just seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling at the same time. The final essay presents a new framework for understanding what it is to be modality-specific or to be multisensory.