As many of you will have read over at “Brian Leiter’s”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2005/05/philosophers_he.html that Benj and Jessica are leaving from here for Toronto. (By here, I mean Cornell in Benj’s case, and my block of Marshall St in both cases – they live about 50m away.) This follows up “Delia and Mike”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2005/03/philosophers_gr.html leaving for Princeton a couple of months ago.

These are obviously big philosophical losses. But I wanted to use this space to make a few non-philosophical comments. As anyone who has moved, especially overseas, knows it can be a very disorienting experience. But moving here to Cornell was much easier than I would have expected it to be, largely because of how helpful the my new colleagues were. And Delia, Mike, Benj and Jessica were all _incredibly_ helpful. If their new colleagues provide as much help to them as they did to me, they will feel very lucky indeed!

Of course, it’s not like they stopped being good friends, colleagues and neighbours once I’d settled in. I won’t bore you with more anecdotes, but suffice to say we here at TAR will miss them all very much.

But this _is_ a philosophy blog, so let me add one philosophical point. When I was teaching _Concept of Mind_ I was struck by one feature of Ryle’s argument against sense data. Ryle compares sense data to pictures on a movie screen, and then using some fairly undeveloped theories of what goes on when watching a movie, concludes that sense data can’t do the work they are designed to do. It struck me at the time that there could be some potential for defending sense data by using Ryle’s analogy, but supplementing it with a more sophisticated theory of psycho-aesthetics. The idea didn’t get much further than that, because I didn’t have the foggiest idea _how_ one might carry out this project.

Then lo and behold, at a paper in the department a couple of weeks ago, Benj set out a worked out theory that deployed (among many other nice ideas) this device. The paper “is available online here”:http://people.cornell.edu/pages/beh24/sisd.pdf, and it is very nice paper indeed. I’m not sure I agree with all of Benj’s conclusions. He wants to develop an analogy with Richard Wollheim’s theory where one sees represented objects in photographs or paintings. I’m tempted by the more radical (i.e. blank-stare inducing) view of Kendall Walton’s that we see represented objects _through_ photographs (but not paintings). Given that sense-data theory is rather unpopular these days, and Walton’s theory of photography gets about as much support as Lewis’s theory of possible worlds, I suspect this combination wouldn’t win many friends, and there is more future in doing things Benj’s way. And as I said, he has a very well worked out theory, not just a hunch about how aesthetics might be relevant to philosophy of mind.

This paper of Benj’s is a very strong defence of a theory, sense-data theory, that doesn’t get enough positive attention nowadays, and I highly recommend reading it.