Dr. Hamid Taieb 

My plan at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg is to finalise a book project of mine on theories of colours in phenomenology. More precisely, I plan to write three chapters of the book and unify the manuscript. The problem of colours relates to important questions in the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of perception, and on the relation between the naive and the scientific

worldviews. It consists in asking whether the world as given in our perceptual experience, which is obviously colourful, fits or not with our scientific representation of it, which includes photons, electromagnetic fields and all sorts of other entities, but not colours. It is one of those philosophical questions which in fact interests people far beyond the boundaries of the

philosophical discipline itself. In phenomenology, which is one of the leading philosophical traditions since the turn of the 20th century, many authors defended the naive worldview as much as they could and, in this respect, argued that colours are physical. However, their novel views on the matter are still little known and my book aims to fill this important gap in the

scholarship.