Practice Job Talk: Rob Smithson

“Edenic Idealism”

In this paper, I develop a novel semantic form of idealism about ordinary objects. According to edenic idealism, our ordinary object terms refer to items in the manifest world: the world of primitive objects and properties presented to us in experience. I motivate edenic idealism as a response to puzzles that arise when there is no correspondence between the items presented to us in experience and the items that exist in the external world. I argue that edenic idealism has major semantic advantages over realism: it is the most intuitive view of what ordinary speakers are actually talking about when they use object terms. I also discuss the features of edenic idealism that allow it to overcome the many objections traditionally raised against idealist systems.