2024.11.6 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews
David Pitt, The Quality of Thought, Oxford University Press, 2024, 240pp., $90.00, (hbk), ISBN 9780198789901.
Reviewed by Sam Coleman, University of Hertfordshire
In this little whirlwind of a book, David Pitt, like some philosophical Tasmanian Devil, whirls us across the landscapes of philosophy of language and philosophy of mind, overturning dilapidated doctrines and whisking away outdated structures. Once it has forcefully achieved its destructive work, this whirlwind leaves behind seemingly stronger, more elegant formations; leaner, shorn of excrescences, and better prepared for futurity—altogether a more attractive vista.
Pitt advances a phenomenal intentionality, or ‘phenomenalist’, thesis, that mental content is determined by, indeed is nothing other than, various styles of phenomenal quality. As he says, ‘Our primal encounter with intentionality [and content] is our encounter with our own minds’ (29). Content, for Pitt, just is experience. Well, with one complication, which is that there also seems to be…
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