Beyond Vision
Philosophical Essays

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.

Casey O'Callaghan is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis. O'Callaghan's research aims at an empirically informed philosophical understanding of perception that is driven by thinking about non-visual modalities and the relationships among the senses. His publications have focused upon auditory perception, speech perception, and the theoretical import of multimodality, cross-modal perceptual illusions, and synesthesia. O'Callaghan is author of Sounds: A Philosophical Theory (Oxford, 2007). He received a B.A. in Philosophy and Cognitive Science from Rutgers University and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Princeton University.