A New Problem for Aesthetics

Abstract

Philosophers tend to be impressed by human self-knowledge.Descartes (1641/1984) thought our knowledge of our own stream of experience was the secure and indubitable foundation upon which to build our knowledge of the rest of the world.Hume -who was capable of being skeptical about almost anything -said that the only existences we can be certain of are our own sensory and imagistic experiences (1739/1978, p. 212).Perhaps the most prominent writer on self-knowledge in contemporary philosophy is Sydney Shoemaker.The central aim of much of his work has been to show that certain sorts of error are impossible (1963, 1988, 1994).DavidChalmers has likewise attempted to show that, for a suitably constrained class of beliefs about