Tim Crane quotes:

Catholicism is the most philosophical branch of Christianity.

One philosophically fascinating aspect of Catholicism is the very strange conception of reality it presents (the incarnation, the eucharist, judgement day etc.).

Unlike art which contains a message, wine conveys nothing, it has no intellectual or cognitive content

I had abandoned Catholicism, but even during my short militant atheist period I maintained an interest in western religious art and music.

I have a general moral: great philosophers may be great, but that is not a reason to follow them. Don't be a follower. Work it out for yourself.

I'm not a militant atheist, just an atheist. In fact, in a largely atheist country like the UK I think it's a bit silly to be a militant atheist.

Naturalism is a methodological rather than a metaphysical view. It's because I am a naturalist, actually, that I am sceptical about physicalism.

Taken as hypotheses, religious claims do very badly. Yet the striking fact is that this does not worry Christians.

Although a lot of my work on the mind has been rather abstract and philosophical, I'm interested in psychology and neuroscience and I don't think there are any principled distinctions between the kind of knowledge we get from science and the knowledge we get from philosophy.

I do think it's important to distinguish between intentionalism about consciousness and externalism about consciousness. Intentionalism says that consciousness is a form of intentionality - the representation of things to the mind. Externalism says that these things have to exist in order for them to be represented, or presented. These are different views.

I like to think of myself as a naturalist - insofar as that term is at all clear.

Since I don't believe in externalism, I don't think it can explain consciousness!

The wine itself has aesthetic value; but what it is for a wine to have aesthetic value cannot be understood without making reference to the experience to tasting it

Wine is not discovered but made: it is an artifact that can be appraised that can be appraised aesthetically