Umrao Sethi is assistant professor of philosophy at Brandeis University. Prior to that, she was an assistant professor at the City University of New York. She received her PhD in philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley and her BA in Psychology from Columbia University. Her interests lie at the intersection of the philosophy of perception, metaphysics and early modern philosophy. She is currently writing a book on the nature of sensory experience and the sensible world. In 2022-2023, she was a William J. Bouwsma and NEH Fellow at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina. She has previously received a Professional Staff Congress-CUNY Research Award as well as funding from the New Directions in the Study of Mind Project based at Cambridge University.
We often speak of an entity existing only in the mind, but what exactly do we mean when we speak this way? In this talk, I will look at different accounts of what it is for something to exist in the mind. I will argue that none of these accounts do justice to a specific set of cases involving sensory phenomena like afterimages, phosphenes and hallucinations. When a subject experiences a green afterimage, it seems appropriate to say that the green afterimage exists only in her mind, but if I am right, we have no good account of what this amounts to. I will then offer a diagnosis for why standard accounts fail in the case of sensory experience and outline a more promising approach
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