ABSTRACT
Vision dominates philosophical theorizing about perception, experience, and the mind. The psychology and cognitive science of vision have captivated philosophers, and other modalities of sensation and perception have received little consideration. Increasingly, however, philosophers recognize the drawbacks of this unbalanced approach, and interest recently has grown in providing an account of audition and its objects. The philosophical study of audition promises to enrich work on the nature and character of perceptual experience since hearing provides a distinctive variety of awareness whose features distinguish it from vision. Hearing poses challenging puzzles for any comprehensive, general theory of perception. In addition, a fertile and growing empirical literature exists to inform philosophical work. Attention to theoretical issues and experimental results in the psychology of audition raises fresh questions about the nature of sounds, and hearing and impacts longstanding philosophical debates about perceptual experience. I wish in this essay to provide the theoretical and psychological framework to the philosophy of sounds and audition. Four fruitful areas deserve attention: auditory scene analysis and the nature of sounds; spatial hearing; the audible qualities; and cross-modal interactions.
