Abstract
In this paper, I argue for two claims. First, Alva Noë’s
discussions of perceptual presence contain an ambiguity between
what I refer to as ‘presence as absence’ (PA) and ‘virtual presence’
(VP). This ambiguity emerges in Noë’s solution to ‘the problem of
perceptual presence’, or the problem of how to account for our perceptual
experience of that which we ‘strictly speaking’ are not seeing.
Second, his account of presence by degrees, i.e. his radical claim that
many distant, out-of-view objects are (quasi-perceptually) present to
us by various degrees, will not be tenable whether unpacked in terms
of PA or VP: e.g. Noë argues that the presence of the tomato in front
of him, and the presence of his friend Dominic in a distant country,
are different not in kind but in degree only. Neither of the two conceptions
of presence renders this plausible.