International Colour Day Celebration on Philosophy of Colour
Published: 25 March 2026
We are hosting a workshop on Philosophy of Colour sponsored by Colour Group UK and Scots Philosophical Association as part of the PPN series and Philosophy Fortnight.
We are hosting a workshop on Philosophy of Colour sponsored by Colour Group UK and Scots Philosophical Association as part of the PPN series and the BPA Philosophy Fornight.
March 25, 2026
Location: Clarice Pears Building, rm 102, University of Glasgow
Schedule
12:00-1:10 "Color Dualism" Derek H. Brown (Glasgow)
1:15-2:25 "Seeing Colors Without Seeing Light" Viviane Mizrahi (Geneva)
2:30-3:40 "Colours and Conscious Attention" Keith Allen (York)
3:45-5:00 "Grounding Colour in Consciousness" Martine Nida-Rümelin (Fribourg)
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Abstracts
Color Dualism
Derek H. Brown (Glasgow)
Colour dualism asserts that there are two distinct and equally important types of colours. Qualitative (or internal) colours are subjective, and needed to explain fundamental colour phenomena such as perceptual colour space, and colour variation. However, colour perceptual states are also very good at facilitating perceptions of wavelength features in our environment. This is best explained by positing environmental (or objective) colours. I argue for colour dualism by first isolating what colour eliminativists (according to whom nothing in our environment has colour) get right, and where they go wrong. I then offer an argument from colour precision for the existence of environmental colours. This argument involves a novel interpretation of colour metamers. I conclude by showing how to generalize the argument from colour precision to provide a broader justification for environmental (objective) colours alongside qualitative (internal) ones.
Seeing Colors Without Seeing Light
Vivian Mizrahi (Geneva)
This paper starts from a provocative claim: light itself is not seen. Proposed by Aristotle, this view regards light as the medium of sight rather than its proper object. Unlike reflectance physicalism, which treats light as enabling a surface’s color to be manifested, or color relationalism, which makes illumination constitutive of color, the medium theory maintains that colors are entirely independent of light, which merely provides the conditions for their visibility.
I argue that this account of light’s invisibility yields a novel solution to the problems raised by color constancy. The traditional Helmholtzian approach explains constancy through “discounting the illuminant”: the visual system estimates the illuminant’s properties and compensates for them to recover the “true” color of surfaces. But if light is colorless and invisible, there is no variable chromatic component to discount.
Drawing on Husserl’s perspectivist framework, I propose that chromatic variations under different illuminations are perspectival presentations of a single color property, analogous to how spatial variations present different aspects of shape. Illumination functions as a selector determining which chromatic profile becomes accessible. We perceive stable colors not by discounting a chromatic component attributed to light, but by grasping variations as different perspectives on the same objective color. I contrast this approach with Brown’s layering thesis, color relationalism, reflectance physicalism, and enactivism.
Colours and Conscious Attention
Keith Allen (York)
What is the relationship between colours and conscious attention? According to John Campbell (Reference and Consciousness, 2002), perception is most fundamentally a relation to visible properties (like colours) at various locations, available for use in the selection of objects as figure from ground. Campbell’s claim draws on an interpretation of Feature Integration Theory, early versions of which allowed for colours to 'float freely’ from objects outside of conscious attention. On this approach, colours are only seen as properties of objects when we consciously attend to them. This paper defends an alternative view according to which colours contribute pre-attentively to the segregation of a scene into objects, but which still allows that there are ways in which conscious attention affects how colours appear.
Grounding Colour in Consciousness
Martine Nida-Rümelin (Fribourg)
When a subject perceives an object as turquoise, then the object appears to the subject to have a specific surface property. It is plausible to assume that whatever the nature of colours might be, they certainly are the properties things appear to have in colour perception. In other words, they are the properties of things that render the corresponding colour perceptions veridical.
I am going to argue for the stronger claim that what it is for an object to have a certain colour is exhausted by the fact that having that colour renders certain phenomenal kinds of experiences of that object veridical. Arguably, then, colour experiences are ontologically more fundamental than colours: colours are grounded in consciousness.
This version of subjectivism about the nature of colour avoids a number of well-known problems faced by rival theories about the nature of colour such as variants of objectivism, dispositionalism and primitivism. However, when combined with highly plausible further assumptions (among them the undeniable fact of intersubjective variation in colour vision) the view that will be suggested has an unwelcome consequence, namely illusionism about colour, the claim that nothing is ever coloured.
First published: 25 March 2026