If I were a better human being, that person's voice wouldn't sound so shrill to me. Many of us may have had such thoughts. They give voice to the worrying intuition that if we were less affected by sexism and racism, or better at keeping our tempers, our fellow humans would look and sound differently to us. In Alien Experience, Maura Tumulty argues that we should take this sense of unease seriously. It is as philosophically significant as our unease over desires or fears that we disown. Making sense of this unease requires us to re-think the relation between experiences and standing commitments; to re-consider what we mean by self-control; and to attend to empirical questions about perception, attention, and tacit cognition.

In taking up these issues, Alien Experience illuminates and questions a significant assumption that underlies debates in the philosophy of mind, moral psychology, and ethics: While we may be answerable (morally, ethically, legally) for our attitudes and emotions, we are not answerable in any interesting way for our perceptions and sensations. Tumulty argues that this assumption leads to a flattened view of the ways experiences are related to agency. Recognizing that we can be alienated from our experiences helps us appreciate distinctive opportunities for self-improvement.

Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1: Alien Experience
Section 1: Agency in attitudes-and experience?
Section 2: A sketch of alienated experience
Section 3: How could such endorsement or rejection be significant?
Section 4: Ways an agent can reject an experience
Section 5: Consequences and concerns
Chapter 2: Self-Control
Section 1: Judgment sensitivity
Section 2: Managerial self-control
Section 3: Distinctively first-personal managerial self-control
Section 4: Imagination and instrumental reasons
Section 5: Alienable experiences
Section 6: Will-power and obsession
Chapter 3: The Forensic Approach to Experience
Section 1: Alienation and false belief
Section 2: The forensic approach to experience
Section 3: A bit more about cognitive penetration
Section 4: What if the IAT research program is built on sand?
Section 5: Are we presupposing an ideal experience?
Chapter 4: Paths to Alienation
Section 1: Food, fit, fallacy
Section 2: Experiencing buildings
Section 3: Traces of atrocity
Section 4: Responding to troubling invitations
Chapter 5: Consequences for Philosophy of Perception
Section 1: Naïve realism
Section 2: Hallucination and illusion
Section 3: Denying high-level properties
Section 4: The need for representation
Section 5: Wishful seeing

Maura Tumulty is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Colgate University. She received her PhD from the University of Pittsburgh, her MSc from the University of Edinburgh, and her BA from Williams College. She is interested in questions at the intersection of philosophy of mind and moral psychology.