This is a paper about The Causal Self‐Referential Theory of Perception. According to The Causal Self‐Referential Theory as developed by above all John Searle and David Woodruff Smith, perceptual content is satisfied by an object only if the object in question has caused the perceptual experience. I argue initially that Searle's account cannot explain the distinction between hallucination and illusion since it requires that the state of affairs that is presented in the perceptual experience must exist in order for the perception to be veridical. Smith's account is interestingly different in that the descriptive content, i.e. the content that presents the perceptual object as having certain properties, does not determine the object of the experience. His account consequently does not require that the state of affairs that is presented in perception exists in order for the perception to have an object. Smith argues instead that perceptual reference is determined by a specific kind of demonstrative content. In this paper it is argued that Smith's account of demonstrative content is too indeterminate and in certain circumstances prescribes the wrong object. It is subsequently argued that the theory of demonstrative content can be modified so as to avoid these consequences. This modification involves deriving the conditions of satisfaction of seeing an object from the conditions of satisfaction of seeing the shape of the object, where the shape of the object is conceived of as a particularized property, what is also called a ‘trope’.

Barry Smith has recently argued against John Searle’s thesis that institutional facts exist because they are represented as existing in a certain community. Smith argues that institutional facts can exist even though they are not represented as existing and that institutional facts can fail to obtain even though they are represented as obtaining. In this paper it is argued that Smith’s challenge can be met for a certain class of legal facts. I argue that in order to solve the problem posed by Smith, we must distinguish between three different kinds of institutional facts and between three different kinds of representation which sustain their existence.

It has frequently been observed in the literature on hybrid wars that there is a grey zone between peace and war, and that hybrid wars are conflicts which are not clear cases of war. In this paper, I attempt to illuminate this grey zone and the concept and nature of war from the philosophical discussions of vagueness and institutional facts. Vague terms are characterized by the fact that there is no non-arbitrary boundary between entities which lie in their extension, and entities which do not lie in their extension. I apply a theory of vagueness to notions such as "war" and "peace" and go on to suggest that the exact boundary for what counts as a war or not is arbitrary. However, the context in which the conflict occurs determines a range of possible locations for this boundary. The most important contextual parameter is in this respect how the parties to the conflict themselves conceptualize the conflict. I suggest that this can in various ways help us understand greyzone conflicts.

The topic of this paper is the perception of properties. It is argued that the perception of properties allows for a distinction between the sense of the identity and the sense of the qualitative nature of a property. So, for example, we might perceive a property as being identical over time even though it is presented as more and more determinate. Thus, you might see an object first as red and then as crimson red. In this case, the property is perceived as identical over time, even though the sense of the qualitative nature (the redness, the crimson redness) of the property is changing. The distinction between the sense of identity and the sense of quality is explicated in terms of perceiving a particular property, a trope, and perceiving it as an instance of a universal. It is subsequently argued that the perceived tropes cannot constitute the phenomenal character of the perceptual experience.

The strongest argument for the A-theory of time seems to be that we can somehow experience that time passes. Since it seems to us that time pass, so the argument goes, we need very good reasons to reject the A-theory. Recently however, several philosophers have challenged the assumption behind this argument. 2 They argue to the contrary that we never perceive events as present or past, but merely as simultaneous, earlier or later in relation to each other. In this paper I wish to defend the assumption behind the A-theory that we can indeed perceive events as present and past. Whether or not this gives much support for the A-theory however, is a separate question which I shall mostly refrain from discussing. My argument will be presented in three steps. In the first section I shall introduce some