"Seeing Opacity and Transparency," John Kulvicki, Dartmouth College

Please join us for the first Neurophilosophy Forum talk of the year, featuring John Kulvicki, Professor of Philosophy at Dartmouth College.

“Seeing Opacity and Transparency”

John Kulvicki, Dartmouth College

📅 Friday, October 16, 2026

⏰ 3:00 PM

📍 25 Park Place NE, Room 1618

Abstract:

Visual perusal of a scene reveals the colors, shapes, and orientations of objects. At much the same level of immediacy, it also reveals whether those things are opaque or transparent. The natural way to characterize opaque and transparent things is in terms of how we see them. We can see through transparent things. Opaque stuff, not so much. But these perception-involving characterizations cannot be the final word. We don’t, in any basic sense, see seeing or what we can see. The natural follow-up is that opaque things fail to transmit light, while transparent things transmit it coherently. This proposal is not as simple as it seems. More generally, I propose that perception-involving features like transparency and opacity pose distinctive explanatory challenges. They are distinct from those presented by the secondary qualities, like color and smell, as well as from the problems relating to perspectival features, as when a square tabletop somehow looks trapezoidal, from here. I offer one way to deal with these challenges.