ABSTRACT
Somogy Varga introduces three ideas to which a large part of the contemporary literature on dehumanization is committed to: first, dehumanization involves some degree of denial of humanness; second, such denial is to be comprehended in mental terms; and, third, whatever exact mechanisms underlie the denial of humanness, they belong in the realm of post-perceptual processing. He then examines the third idea and argues that the awareness of minds might belong to perceptual processing. This paves the way for the possibility that dehumanization might, at least in part, be a perceptual phenomenon, such that dehumanizers visually perceive the dehumanized as exhibiting lesser-than-human minds.
