Argumenta – Journal of Analytic Philosophy

Smith’s Film, Art and the Third Culture is dedicated to developing a naturalized aesthetics of film, and at the heart of his proposal for a methodological “triangulation” is the principle that our research should take serious account of three levels of analysis, each with its respective type of evidence: the phenomenological level, the psychological level, and the neurophysiological level. While Smith addresses many aspects of our perceptual, emotional, and cognitive engagement with movies within this framework, he rarely discusses what underlies our visual engagement with films: the fact that they…

This paper outlines my theory of moral perception, extends the theory beyond its previous statements, and defends it from a number of objections posed in the literature. The paper distinguishes the perceptible from the perceptual; develops a structural analogy between perception and action; explains how moral perception, despite its normative status, can be causal in the way appropriate to genuine perception; clarifies the respects in which moral perception is representational; and indicates how it provides an objective basis for moral knowledge. In the light of this account of moral perception,…