In recent literature, several authors attempt to naturalize epistemic normativity by employing an etiological account of functions. The thought is that epistemic entitlement consists in the normal functioning of our belief-acquisition systems, where the latter acquire the function to reliably deliver true beliefs through a history of biological benefit.

In 1984, John W. Yolton published Perceptual Acquaintance from Descartes to Reid. His most recent book builds on that seminal work and greatly extends its relevance to issues in current philosophical debate. Perception and Reality examines the theories of perception implicit in the work of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers which centered on the question: How is knowledge of the body possible? That question raises issues of mind-body relation, the way that mentality links with physicality, and the nature of (...) the known world. In contrast to commonsense realism, which suggests that the world is as it appears to be, a more complex theory developed throughout this period. Yolton traces its evolution from Descartes to Kant, via Arnauld, Malebranche, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. Yolton explains that the new theory postulated two interactive relations between perceivers and the physical world, one physical and causal, the other cognitive. An understanding of this double relation is important for an accurate construction of the history of philosophy. It is also important for contemporary thought because it suggests a way to account for representation (cognitivity) and realism at the same time. (shrink)

If artworks and their aesthetic properties stand in constitutive relationships to historical context and circumstances, so that some understanding of relevant facts is involved in responding to a work, what becomes of the intuitive view that we see artworks and at least some of their aesthetic properties? This question is raised by arguments in both aesthetics and art history for the historical nature of works of art. The paper argues that the answer needs to take philosophy of perception (...) into account. The principal development that has shaped philosophy of perception in the last thirty years—explaining perceptual experience in terms of contents that represent that such-and-such is the case—is directly relevant to key arguments for the historical nature of art because contents can represent complex kinds and properties. Conceptual realism is especially well-suited for explaining perception of artworks and aesthetic properties because it emphasizes that forms of understanding—in the sense of capacities, abilities and techniques—are involved in perceptual engagement with individual objects and instances of properties. To make this case, the paper examines influential arguments for the historical nature of art and aesthetic properties by Arthur C. Danto and Kendall L. Walton; and examines art-historical discussions by Michael Baxandall, Linda Nochlin and T. J. Clark. The paper argues that the aesthetic properties of an artwork depend on human intentional uses of properties, colours and contours among them, and such uses may themselves be aesthetic. The Wittgensteinian notion of use is contextual and historical, and uses are perceptible. (shrink)

Afterthoughts on biases in history perception Contemporary social psychology describes various deformations of processing social information leading to distortions of knowledge about other people. What is more, a person in everyday life refers to lay convictions and ideas common in his/her cultural environment that distort his/her perceptions. Therefore it is difficult to be surprised that authors of narrations in which participants of history are presented use easily available common-sense psychology, deforming images of both the participants of (...) class='Hi'>history and their activities, as well as the sequence of events determined by these activities. Which cognitive biases, how often, and in what intensity they will be presented in historical narrations depend on statements of dominating common-sense psychology. The article outlines some biases made by historian-lay psychologists, such as attributional asymmetry or hindsight effects, whose occurrence in their thinking, as formed in the cultural sphere of the West, influences history perception and conducted historical interpretations. (shrink)

Everson presents a comprehensive new study of Aristotle's account of perception and related mental capacities. Recent debate about Aristotle's theory of mind has focused on this account, which is Aristotle's most sustained and detailed attempt to describe and explain the behavior of living things. Everson places this account in the context of Aristotle's natural science as a whole, showing how Aristotle applies the explanatory tools he developed in other works to the study of perceptual cognition.

John Yolton describes this collection of nine essays as "a kind of a sequel" to his 1984 book Perceptual Acquaintance from Descartes to Reid. Four of the chapters have previously appeared in print, and most can stand on their own, presuming little or no familiarity with previous chapters. Indeed, the title is somewhat misleading, for the material is not presented in chronological fashion, and there is little attention given to Leibniz and none to Spinoza--not what one would expect to find (...) in a history from Descartes to Kant. (shrink)

This book is a philosophical analysis of Plotinus' views on sense-perception. It aims to show how his thoughts were both original and a development of the ideas of his predecessors, in particular those of Plato, Aristotle and the Peripatetics. Special attention is paid to Plotinus' dualism with respect to soul and body and its implications for his views on the senses. The author combines a historical approach to his subject, setting Plotinus' thought in the context of thinkers who preceded (...) and succeeded him, with a proper analysis of his ideas and, where appropriate, of those from which they derived. (shrink)

How does perception give us access to external reality? This book critically engages with John McDowell's conceptualist answer to this question, by offering a new exploration of his views on perception and reality in relation to those of Immanuel Kant and Edmund Husserl. In six chapters, the book examines these thinkers' respective theories of perception, lucidly describing how they fit within their larger philosophical views on mind and reality. It thereby not only reveals the continuity of a (...) tradition that underlies today's fragmented scholarly landscape, but also yields a new critique of McDowell's conceptualist theory. In doing so, the book contributes to the ongoing bridging of traditions, by combining analytic philosophy, Kantian philosophy, and phenomenology. Perception and Reality in Kant, Husserl, and McDowell will appeal to scholars and students working in the history of philosophy, phenomenology, Kantian philosophy, and in particular the philosophy of perception. (shrink)

Contributors to this book include key theorists and practitioners from media theory, Native Science, bio-media and sound art, philosophy, art history and design informatics. Collectively, they examine the becoming-technique of animal-human- machinic perceptibilities; and micro-perceptions that lie beneath the threshold of known perceptions yet create energetic vibrations. Who, what, and where perceives, and how? What are the sedimentations, inscriptions and axiologies of animal, human and machinic perceptions? What are their perceptibilities? Deleuze uses the word 'visibilities' to indicate that visual (...) perception isn't just a physiological given but cues operations productive of new assemblages. Perceptibilities are, by analogy, spatio- temporal, geolocative, kinaesthetic, audio-visual, and haptic operations that are always already memory. In the case of strong inscriptions, they are also epigenetic events. The contributors show distributed perception to be a key notion in addressing the emergence and persistence of plant, animal, human and machine relations. An invaluable reference for students and scholars in a range of areas including Media Theory, Sociology, Philosophy, Art and Design. (shrink)

The philosophical issues raised by perception make it one of the central topics in the philosophical tradition. Debate about the nature of perceptual knowledge and the objects of perception comprises a thread that runs through the history of philosophy. In some historical periods the major issues have been predominantly epistemological and related to scepticism, but an adequate understanding of perception is important more widely, especially for metaphysics and the philosophy of mind. For this reason Barry Maund (...) provides an account of the major issues in the philosophy of perception that highlights the importance of a good theory of perception in a range of philosophical fields, while also seeking to be sensitive to the historical dimension of the subject. The work presents chapters on forms of natural realism; theories of perceptual experience; representationalism; the argument from illusion; phenomenological senses; types of perceptual content; the representationalist/intentionalist thesis; and adverbialist accounts of perceptual experience. The ideas of, among others, Austin, Dretske, Heidegger, Millikan, Putnam and Robinson are considered and the reader is given a philosophical framework within which to consider the issues. (shrink)

Questions about perception remain some of the most difficult and insoluble in both epistemology and in the philosophy of mind. This controversial but highly accessible introduction to the area explores the philosophical importance of those questions by re-examining what had until recent times been the most popular theory of perception - the sense-datum theory. Howard Robinson surveys the history of the arguments for and against the theory from Descartes to Husserl. He then shows that the objections to (...) the theory, particularly Wittgenstein's attack on privacy and those of the physicalists, have been unsuccessful. He argues that we should return to the theory sense-data in order to understand perception. In doing so he seeks to overturn a consensus that has dominated the philosophy of perception for nearly half a century. (shrink)

This article considers photography’s role as a visual technology and the consequent effects of expanded frames of knowledge. At the very moment human vision and memory were called into profound doubt, photography provided a mechanical, prosthetic extension to perceptual experience. However, as a technology, it contains the potential for both revelation and control. In this article, photography is considered as a technique that: expands human perception; inscribes its own mechanical operations into new visual forms, therefore enframing and encoding visible (...) knowledge; and can be harnessed as a disciplinary instrument and technique of power. As a consequence, photography’s revealing of hitherto invisible dimensions of reality unfolds within a history of revelation, spectacle and power. (shrink)

This is a book about the metaphysics of perception and discusses touch, audition, and vision. Though primarily concerned with the nature of perception, it draws heavily from the history of philosophy of perception, and connects the concerns of analytical and continental philosophers.

(2012). Speusippus on Cognitive Sense Perception: Sextus Empiricus M 7.145‐6. British Journal for the History of Philosophy: Vol. 20, No. 6, pp. 1183-1193. doi: 10.1080/09608788.2012.731246.

History, like language and other cultural "systems of signification," depends upon the transmission or communication of meaning in time. This implies that history is subject to a process of cultural selection more characteristic of language and that the true objects of historical research and inquiry must be understood as intended communications. The selection of particular elements for use in a cultural system is made on the basis of "place-values" which direct but do not determine the form of the (...) culture. These are neither individual nor comprehensive decisions, but rather are general systems of actions, ideas, and beliefs. Nonetheless, a value has been placed on the elements themselves which indicates that, within the system, their significance is recognized and their preservation intended. There exists a link between fame and the culture's perception of its own influence and greatness over time. (shrink)

Many of Margaret Cavendish’s criticisms of Thomas Hobbes in the Philosophical Letters (1664) relate to the disorder and damage that she holds would result if Hobbesian pressure were the cause of visual perception. In this paper, I argue that her “two men” thought experiment in Letter IV is aimed at a different goal: to show the explanatory potency of her account. First, I connect Cavendish’s view of visual perception as “patterning” to the “two men” thought experiment in Letter (...) IV. Second, I provide a potential reply on Hobbes’s behalf that appeals to physiological differences between perceivers’ sense organs, drawing upon Hobbes’s optics in De homine. Third, I argue that such a reply would misunderstand Cavendish’s objective of showing the limited explanatory resources available in understanding visual perception as pressing when compared to her view of visual perception as patterning. (shrink)

Study of the changing nature of the perception of an action and the action itself, and how thought-processes altered radically in the Middle Ages"--Provided by publisher.

The research aimed to gain understanding of the self-perceptions of black professionals in relation to business leadership, and how these self-perceptions influenced their behaviors, aspirations and self-perceived abilities in leadership positions. The study was specifically focused on black South African professionals. Black professionals were found to exhibit signs of deep-rooted pain, anger and general emotional fatigue stemming from workplace-, socio-economic- and political triggers that evoked generational trauma and overall negative black lived experiences. The negative lived experiences could have led to (...) racial identity dissonance and, in extreme cases, complete racial identity disassociation. Moreover, black professionals were found to display symptoms of ‘survivor guilt,’ stemming from the shared history of oppression amongst black people in South Africa. The ‘survivor guilt’ contributed toward a profound sense of shared responsibility and purpose to change the circumstances, experiences and overall perceptions about the capabilities of black professionals. Results showed that upbringing, determination, resilience, black support networks, and black leadership representation within organizational structures were important ingredients that positively contributed to the leadership aspirations and success of black professionals. The research discovered that, in some cases, black professionals leveraged white relationships to propel their careers forward, however, this practice reportedly resulted in the black professionals experiencing feelings of self-doubt in their own abilities. Self-doubt, also found to be a result of historical oppression, could have and have been shown to eventually lead to self-deselection, negatively impacting the aspirations and career advancement prospects of black professionals in organizational leadership. Furthermore, the research found that black leaders believed that their blackness, specifically, its unique texture of experiences and history in South Africa, provided them with superior empathetic leadership abilities toward other black employees. Black leaders frequently highlighted the distinctive values of ubuntu as the cornerstone of their leadership approach. In addition, it was found that black professionals also considered their blackness, particularly the shade of their skin, to detract from their leadership opportunities, as it reduced the odds of being authorized as natural leaders, thus fortifying a skewed self-perception of their own leadership capabilities. (shrink)

本論は、メルロ=ポンティによる曖昧で未完成な歴史哲学へのプロジェクトを吟味し、それをレヴィナスの『全体性と無限』における歴史主義への批判と比較している。メルロ=ポンティに従えば、人間の歴史的行動には、 特別な「取り返し（reprise）」という現象が見られる。それは、広義の世界、つまり自然と人間世界に由来する提供物、つまり世界の肉や「逆境（adversité）」を通じて、不明瞭な「提案（propos ition）」の内容を存在させる（faire être）働きである。提案されたことを取り返す運動は、ある種の「襞（pli）」の形を取る。このような分節は、ヘーゲルとは異なる斬新な弁証法の可能性を含んでいる。メルロ=ポンティのアプローチは、マルクス 主義や実存主義における歴史論とは異なり、美術作品における歴史性への解釈学に基づく存在論として理解できる。さらには、彼の諸見解は哲学史に注意を払うことで、哲学自体による哲学自身についての歴史的知覚までに 広がる。その独自的な観点からすると、メルロ=ポンティは、ヤスパースやパトチカ、またリクールやデリダなどの傍に、歴史の現象学に関する代表者の一人であることが明らかになる。.

The study of preconscious versus conscious processing has an extensive history in cognitive psychology, dating back to the writings of William James. Much of the experimental work on this issue has focused on perception, conceived of as input analysis, and on the relation of consciousness to attentional processing. The present paper examines when input analysis becomes conscious from the perspectives of cognitive modelling, methodology, and a more detailed understanding of what is meant by "conscious processing." Current evidence suggests (...) that perception becomes conscious at a late-arising stage of focal-attentive processing concerned with information integration and dissemination. Reliable criteria for determining when perception becomes conscious combine the evidence of "first-person," phenomenological reports with "third-person" functional dissociations between preconscious and conscious processing. There are three, distinct senses in which a process may be said to be "conscious." It might be "conscious" (a) in the sense that one is conscious of the process, (b) in the sense that the operation of the process is accompanied by consciousness (of its results) and (c) in the sense that consciousness enters into or causally influences the process. Consciousness of familiar stimuli, rather than entering into input analysis, appears to follow it, in human information processing. Processes closely associated with the appearance of consciousness such as information integration and dissemination appear to operate unconsciously. Consequently, perception appears to be "conscious" only in sense (b). (shrink)

The past is what happened. History is what we remember and write about that past, the narratives we craft to make sense and meaning out of our memories and their sources. But what does it mean to look at the past and see Nothing? This book redefines Nothing as a historical object and reorients historical consciousness in terms of an awareness of what has and has not been considered worth remembering. "Nothing" has been a catch-all term for everything that (...) is supposedly uninteresting, not happening, all that we have skipped over or is just not there. It will take some (possibly considerable) mental adjustment before we can see Nothing in the way this author has come to think of it, with a capital N. But if we are to transform Nothing into a legitimate historical object, something that exists in the present and has existed in the past, we must see it that way. For Nothing has actually been there all along, in plain sight. When nothing has changed but we think that it should have, we might call that injustice; when nothing happened over a long, slow period of time, we might call that boring. Justice and boredom have histories. So too does being disappointed when nothing happens-for instance, when a forecast end of the world does not occur, and millennial movements have to regroup and recalibrate their predictions. By paying attention to how we understand Nothing to be happening in the present, what it means to "know Nothing" or to "do Nothing," we can begin to ask how those experiences will be remembered. Visually driven, this book explores the ways that modern photographers, artists and writers have depicted ruins, emptiness, and a lack of action. It shows us how the perception that "nothing is the way it was" has produced images and art about memories. The book also analyzes such phenomena as fake historical markers that joke about how "On This Site Nothing Happened" to reflect on our everyday awareness that important events and places from the past be remembered. Most of all, it uncovers the mistake of taking Nothing for granted--because Nothing is happening all the time. (shrink)

The early Greek Stoics were the first philosophers to recognize the object of normal human perception as predicative or propositional in nature. Fundamentally we do not perceive qualities or things, but situations and things happening, facts. To mark their difference from Plato and Aristotle, the Stoics adopted phantasia as their word for perception.

Jerry Fodor wrote the following assessment of Danto’s importance in 1993: “Danto has done something I’ve been very much wanting to do: namely, reconsider some hard problems in aesthetics in the light of the past 20 years or so of philosophical work on intentionality and representation” (Fodor 1993, p. 41). Fodor is absolutely right: some of Danto’s work could be thought of as the application of some influential ideas about perception that Fodor also shared. The problem is that these (...) ideas have turned out to be false. Both Danto and Fodor are modularist: they both think that perception is an encapsulated process that is in no way influenced by any kind of non-perceptual processing (see, e.g., Fodor 1983, Pylyshyn 1984). Many of Danto’s famous and influential arguments rely very directly on this modularist assumption. There is now, however, a wealth of evidence against modularism of the strong kind held to by Danto and Fodor. We now know that perceptual experience is not determined entirely by the retinal input: our visual processing is influenced at various point in a top-down manner. What we know and what kinds of visual stimuli we have encountered previously deeply influence how the retinal input is processed. The empirical literature on this is vast and conclusive (for an overview, see Teufel and Nanay 2017 but see also the references in the last section of this paper). What does this mean for Danto’s views on art and perception? While one of Danto’s premises may turn out to be false, the history and examples he gave are valuable and bear repeating. Even more importantly, Danto’s aesthetics can in part be separated out from his modularism, leading us to draw slightly different but arguably even more interesting conclusions from famous thought experiments such as the Gallery of Indiscernibles. (shrink)

On the basis of the graphic convergence between the English « noise » and the French word « la noise » , this article attempts to identify a percept that would be specific to the transgeneric reality of noise music. In order to understand how noise has become a source of aesthetic enjoyment, it revisits the history of recording devices, and proposes a philosophical hypothesis on the type of affect that is nurtured and fostered by those who expose themselves (...) to the noise experience : an ontological-political exploration of « letting-be ». (shrink)

How we come to know the external world has intrigued thinkers throughout the history of philosophy. Medieval philosophers understood that a theory of perception requires an account of the categorization of sensory information: to perceive things as being dangerous or beneficial and even as being individuals that belong to certain kinds (e.g., 'this is a dog'). A key question is whether this requires the intervention of rational cognitive capacities, cooperating with sensory ones in normal instances of perception. (...) The contributions to this volume investigate how thinkers from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries answer this and other related questions about human perception. Contributors are Fabrizio Amerini, Joel Biard, Veronique Decaix, Christian Kny, Lydia Schumacher, Josee Filipe Silva, and Jorg Alejandro Tellkamp. (shrink)

Unlike many books of its kind, this collection of essays is more than a mere aggregate of papers loosely ordered around a set of common themes. In fact, for a work sensitive to the values inherent in the analytical tradition, it is surprisingly systematic, and strikes a happy balance between the products of the system-builders and the deliverances of those who are content to give us merely isolated insights. It embodies a sound knowledge of the history of philosophy, a (...) sensitivity to the contributions of the British philosophers since Bradley, and a desire to take science seriously without succumbing to the reductionism which so often characterized the contributions of the positivists. Throughout the papers the influence of Carnap, Kant and Wittgenstein is especially evident; and perhaps most characteristic are the repeated attempts to tread carefully, with their help, the sometimes narrow lines dividing realist and phenomenalist, realist and idealist, and realist and nominalist. Sellars is at pains to incorporate in his system the partial truths which always characterize conflicting philosophical alternatives. This book is well worth careful, critical study by philosophers of all persuasions.--C. V. (shrink)

Perception has been for philosophers in the last few decades an area of compelling interest and intense investigation. In large part, the catalyst for this activity has come from contemporary cognitive science and neuroscience, which has been progressing at an accelerating pace, throwing up new information about the brain and new conceptions of how sensory information is processed and used. These new conceptions offer philosophers opportunities for reconceptualizing the senses—what they tell us, how we use them, and the nature (...) of the knowledge they give us. Today, the philosophy of perception resonates with ideas that had not even been articulated in the 1970s and 1980s. This Handbook is a survey by leading philosophical thinkers of contemporary issues and new thinking in philosophy of perception. It includes sections on the history of the subject, introductions to contemporary issues in the epistemology, ontology, and aesthetics of perception, treatments of the individual sense modalities and of the things we perceive by means of them, and a consideration of how perceptual information is integrated and consolidated. New analytic tools and applications to other areas of philosophy are discussed in depth. Each of the forty-five entries is written by a leading expert, some collaborating with younger figures; each seeks to introduce the reader to a broad range of issues. All contain new ideas on the topic covered; together they are a portrait of the vigour and innovative zeal of a young field. The book is accessible to anybody who has an intellectual interest in issues concerning perception. (shrink)

In recent times it has become fashionable to emphasize the role of conceptual change in the history of science. To judge from recent writers, every significant theoretical change in science is first and foremost a revolution in scientific concepts—a conceptual revolution. According to this view, every level of experience is affected by each fundamental theoretical change: physical theory, experimental practice and even perceptual experience. The Aristotelian patrician who watched the sun sink beneath the horizon not only had different beliefs (...) about the phenomenon but actually saw something different from the Newtonian gentleman who saw the horizon rise above his eye-sun line, and the Einsteinian professional who saw the sun's varying geometrical relations to the world light-geodesics on which successive temporal stages of his eye world-line lay. Moreover, such is the completeness of the conceptual-experiential shifts undergone in a fundamental scientific change that it is impossible to meaningfully discuss the one theory within the confines of the other or, indeed, to provide any systematic, cumulative comparison of successive theories. (shrink)

It is widely held that the content of perceptual experience is propositional in nature. However, in a well-known article, “Is Perception a Propositional Attitude?”, Crane has argued against this thesis. He therein assumes that experience has intentional content and indirectly argues that experience has non-propositional content by showing that from what he considers to be the main reasons in favour of “the propositional-attitude thesis”, it does not really follow that experience has propositional content. In this paper I shall discuss (...) Crane’s arguments against the propositional-attitude thesis and will try to show, in contrast, that they are unconvincing. My conclusion will be that, despite all that Crane claims, perceptual content could after all be propositional in nature. (shrink)

Husserl famously argues that it is essential to perception to present the perceived object in perspectives. Hence, there is no – and there cannot be – perception without perspectival givenness. Yet, it seems that there are counterexamples to this essentialist claim, for we seem to be able to imagine beings that do not perceive in perspectives. Recently, there have been some accounts in the literature that critically discuss those counterexamples and assess to what extent they succeed in challenging (...) Husserl’s essentialist claim. In this paper I discuss three different answers to these counterexamples, all of them are found wanting. I offer a novel solution, taking into account some crucial findings of the contemporary debate about imagination and modality. I argue that this new solution is capable of fully vindicating Husserl’s essentialist claim. Finally, I reconstruct Husserl’s own way to treat such counterexamples, in order to showcase the notion of modality Husserlian phenomenology relies on. I argue for the hitherto widely underappreciated point that Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology cannot appeal to strictly absolute modality but that the kind of modality in Husserlian phenomenology is conditional on the facticity that we have the transcendental structure we do in fact have. (shrink)