ABSTRACT
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. Naturally, the philosophical investigation of audition largely concerns the perception of sounds. If sounds are the primary particulars audition tracks, and are characterized in terms of their own range of attributes, sounds themselves are not mere dimensions of similarity among other particulars. Locational information furnished in audition is not limited to direction. Strong indications suggest that spatial audition presents sounds not as traveling or propagating through the environment as do sound waves, but as having stationary, distal locations. Philosophers on the whole, nonetheless, have been skeptical about the spatial characteristics of audition. In addition to confronting such familiar concerns, philosophers of audition, like philosophers of color, must contend with a controversy among psychologists and empirical researchers.
