John O'Dea

I was raised in rural Queensland, Australia, and studied towards my bachelors degree in philosophy at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, graduating in 1996. I spent the American 1997-8 academic year studying graduate coursework at the University of Maryland outside Washington, D.C., and then took my Ph.D. at Monash University, Melbourne, graduating in 2002. From 2003 to the end of 2005 I was a postdoctoral fellow in the RSSS Philosophy Program at the Australian National University. Currently I am a postdoctoral fellow in the philosophy program of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Tokyo.

Email:

Curiculum Vitae

Current Work: The Senses

The project for which my current fellowship was granted is described in the following way:

The human perceptual system is divided into modes. Traditionally there are considered to be five such modes or senses (sight, hearing, touch taste and smell), though the validity of this tradition has been challenged by the development of, in particular, physiology and neuroscience.
Most today would accept that there are more than five senses (the sense(s) of balance, for example), and some claim that there are twenty, or more, human senses.

Whether these claims deserve acceptance depends on how a mode of perceiving is to be characterized.
Recently this question has received considerable attention among philosophers interested in the nature of human consciousness. Some philosophers claim that the very idea of a mode of perceiving entails that human perceptual experience does not consist merely of a certain sort of representation of the world.

This project considers the very notion of a mode of sensing.