Episode 39, 'The Philosophy of Perception' with Bence Nanay

Bence Nanay is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Antwerp and Research Associate in philosophy at the University of Cambridge. Nanay is also the principal investigator of the European Research Council project, Seeing Things You Don’t See: Unifying the Philosophy, Psychology and Neuroscience of Multimodal Mental Imagery.  As well as publishing more than 100 peer-reviewed articles, Nanay is the author of Between Perception and Action (2013) and Aesthetics as Philosophy of Perception (2016). It will, therefore, come as no surprise that our focus today will be Nanay’s work in the field of ‘philosophy of perception’. In a rare intersection between psychology, neuroscience and philosophy, ‘the philosophy of perception’ is concerned with the status of perceptual data, the nature of perceptual experience, and how this data and these experiences relate to beliefs about, or knowledge of, the world. This interview is produced ‘in association with The Institute of Art and Ideas and the Philosophy for Our Times podcast’. A very special thank you to everybody at the Institute of Art and Ideas for making this interview possible. To celebrate the release of this interview, we’re giving away three signed copies of Nanay’s Between Perception and Action– to be in with a chance of winning, just head over to our Twitter page. *We apologise for the length and audio quality of this episode. We recorded the interview in-between Bence’s talks at How the Light Gets In Festival, where it was tipping it down with rain.