Department Colloquium featuring speaker: Hamid Taieb.
Title: Colours in Early Phenomenology
Abstract: The aim of this talk is to present the views of early phenomenologists on colors. The first part of the talk will be devoted to their discussions on the essence of colors. As I will show, early phenomenologists argue that colors are physical entities according to their essence; more precisely, they are primitive physical entities. In this respect, early phenomenologists reject subjectivism about colors, that is, the thesis that colors are subjective or psychic entities as opposed to physical ones. In the second part of the talk, I will briefly present the views of early phenomenologists on the existence of colors. As I will argue, these authors think that the question of what colors are according to their essence is independent of the question of whether they exist in the outer world or not. In the third part of the talk, I will ask how early phenomenologists can ground truths about the nature of colors, in particular the truth that colors are physical, if these truths are independent of whether colors exist in the outer world, and thus hold even if they do not.