Sex in the Head

Abstract Recent philosophical writing on sexual desire divides broadly into two camps. Reductionists take sexual desire to aim at an essentially physical bodily pleasure, whereas intentionalist accounts take a focus upon the reciprocal interaction of the mental states of the partners to be crucial for understanding the phenomenon. I argue that the apparent plausibility of reductionism rests upon the flawed assumption that sexual pleasure has the same uniform bodily character in all sexual encounters, which rests in turn upon flawed assumptions in the philosophy of mind. Drawing on an Aristotelian understanding of persons as essentially embodied minds, I outline an alternative account of sexual desire, showing how the nature of the sexual pleasure we take in the body of another can be transformed by the significance the person or situation has for us. I proceed to show that my account of sexual desire is able to accommodate the entire range of sexual phenomena, including those that seem to undermine standard intentionalist accounts as well as those that reductionists have difficulty in fully explaining. Finally I make some brief remarks about the implications of my account of sexual desire for sexual morality, suggesting some reasons why it casts doubt on the view that universal participant consent is sufficient for a sexual act to be morally unproblematic.     

Aperture viewing : A review and a synthesis

We argue that two processes are involved in the visual perception of shapes moving behind narrow apertures. “Retinal painting” occurs when the eyes are free to pursue the moving shape and when the traverse time across the aperture is sufficiently short to allow visual persistence of the temporally successive views. When pursuit eye movements do not occur, however, the shape may still be perceived if it moves relatively slowly. The latter kind of perception does not involve seeing all the parts of the shape simultaneously (as in the case with retinal painting) but we demonstrate that shapes seen in this way have some of the same properties as conventionally presented shapes. The discussion emphasises the relevance of these findings to general problems in movement perception.