Uses examples from physics, philosophy, and Zen teachings to describe a purely objective style of perception.

Philosophical theories of perception are generally admitted to be responses to certain problems or puzzles allied to the ancient dichotomy between Appearance and Reality. For they have been mainly provoked by the incompatibility of the common–sense assumption that an external, physical world exists and is revealed to the senses with the well–known facts of perceptual variation and error. If only what is real were perceived just as if only what is right were done it is possible that many of (...) those questions would never have been asked which lead to moral philosophy and a metaphysics of the external world. But sense perceptions of the same object vary so that it appears to have contradictory qualities and are sometimes completely deceptive. Nor do illusory differ internally from veridical perceptions. Moreover, perceptual variation and error can be unmasked only by such procedures as looking more carefully, listening harder, trying to touch, asking others, in short by more sense experience. So the senses are, as it were, both accused and judge in these disputes and why should a venal judge be trusted more than the criminal he tries? Such “correction” of one experience by another of the same kind seems no more reliable than the original “error.” Philosophers have found all this very puzzling. (shrink)

This article considers Helmholtz’s relation to philosophy, including Fichte’s philosophy. Recent interpreters find Fichtean influence on Helmholtz, especially concerning the role of voluntary movement in distinguishing subject from object, or “I” from “not-I.” After examining Helmholtz’s statements about Fichte, the article describes Fichte’s ego-doctrine and asks whether Helmholtz could accept it into his sensory psychology. He could not accept Fichte’s core position, that an intrinsically active I intellectually intuits its own activity and posits the not-I as limiting and (...) determining that activity, because that account requires cognitive abilities that conflict with Helmholtz’s claim that the development of spatial perception relies primarily on associative memory and involves no direct awareness of the ego’s activity as such. Helmholtz would have known various accounts of the distinction between subject and object, or self and world, from sensory physiology, including associative accounts invoking voluntary motor movements and accounts describing checks on the perceiver’s activity. Some of the accounts cite Fichte on the I and not-I, but most do not, and none adopt Fichte’s Idealism. Finally, the article examines Helmholtz’s relation to metaphysics, finding that in all periods he rejected Fichtean Idealism and that the modest metaphysics of his mature period is a version of structural realism. (shrink)

The nature of olfaction; its importance for understanding perennial issues of philosophy of mind, perception, and consciousness; and its implications for cognitive neuroscience. -/- What are smells? Despite the best efforts of philosophy and the chemosciences, the question remains vexing—but no more perplexing than the historical lapse of the past few centuries to seriously consider a sense that has a key place in philosophy of mind and perception. Stinking Philosophy! is Benjamin Young's answer to (...) this critical lapse. Drawing together more than a decade of research on olfactory philosophy, this book offers a clear, comprehensive look at the nature of odors—how we perceive smells, how we cognitively represent odors, how we communicate about them as categories, and what they can tell us about consciousness. -/- In Stinking Philosophy! Young presents a methodology for addressing the philosophical and conceptual issues raised by the sense of smell. Then, in an exacting and coherent fashion, he explores how the philosophy of smell contributes to—and advances—a wide range of debates within philosophy of mind, perception, and cognitive neuroscience. Ultimately, his work demonstrates how empirically informed philosophy can have a significant impact on interdisciplinary research on smell across philosophy, the chemosciences, and neuroscience. (shrink)

Mind perception is the essence of moral judgment. Broadly, moral standing is linked to perceptions of mind, with moral responsibility tied to perceived agency, and moral rights tied to perceived experience. More specifically, moral judgments are based on a fundamental template of two perceived minds—an intentional agent and a suffering patient. This dyadic template grows out of the universal power of harm, and serves as a cognitive working model through which even atypical moral events are understood. Thus, all instances (...) of immorality are perceived to involve both blameworthy agents (i.e., acts) and suffering victims (i.e., consequences). Because moral cognition simultaneously concerns acts and consequences, theories which focus primarily on acts (i.e., deontology) or consequences (i.e., utilitarianism) do not accurately describe moral cognition. Indeed, the phenomenon of dyadic completion suggests that deontological and utilitarian concerns are not only simultaneously active, but also typically compatible and reinforcing: wrong acts have harmful consequences, and harmful consequences stem from wrong acts. The cognitive fusion of acts with consequences suggests that normative conflicts between deontology and utilitarianism are not reflected in everyday moral judgment. This in turn suggests that empirical conclusions drawn from moral dilemmas that pit utilitarianism against deontology—i.e., trolley problems—give an skewed account of moral cognition. (shrink)

The diverse essays in this volume speak to the relevance of phenomenological and psychological questioning regarding perceptions of the human. This designation, human, can be used beyond the mere identification of a species to underwrite exclusion, denigration, dehumanization and demonization, and to set up a pervasive opposition in Othering all deemed inhuman, nonhuman, or posthuman. As alerted to by Merleau-Ponty, one crucial key for a deeper understanding of these issues is consideration of the nature and scope of perception. (...) class='Hi'>Perception defines the world of the perceiver, and perceptual capacities are constituted in engagement with the world – there is co-determination. Moreover, the distinct phenomenology of perception in the spectatorial mode in contrast to the reciprocal mode, deepens the intersubjective and ethical dimensions of such investigations. -/- Questions motivating the essays include: Can objectification and an inhuman gaze serve positive ends? If so, under what constraints and conditions? How is an inhuman gaze achieved and at what cost? How might the emerging insights of the role of perception into our interdependencies and essential sociality from various domains challenge not only theoretical frameworks, but also the practices and institutions of science, medicine, psychiatry and justice? What can we learn from atypical social cognition, psychopathology and animal cognition? Could distortions within the gazer’s emotional responsiveness and habituated aspects of social interaction play a role in the emergence of an inhuman gaze? -/- Perception and the Inhuman Gaze will interest scholars and advanced students working in phenomenology, philosophy of mind, psychology, psychiatry, sociology and social cognition. -/- Table of Contents -/- Introduction -/- Part I. The Gaze in Classical Phenomenology: Perspectives on Objectification -/- 1. Defending the Objective Gaze as a Self-transcending Capacity of Human Subjects -/- Dermot Moran -/- 2. Two Orders of Bodily Objectification: The Look and the Touch -/- Sara Heinämaa -/- 3. On Eliminativism’s Transient Gaze -/- Timothy Mooney -/- 4. Not wholly human. Reading Maurice Merleau-Ponty with Jacques Lacan. -/- Dorothée Legrand -/- 5. Disclosure and the Gendered Gaze in Simone de Beauvoir's Ethics -/- Christinia Landry -/- Part II. Vision, Perception and Gazes -/- 6. Inside the gaze -/- Shaun Gallagher -/- 7. Perception and its Objects. -/- Maurita Harney -/- 8. Technological Gaze: Understanding How Technologies Transform Perception -/- Richard Lewis -/- 9. The Inhuman Gaze and Perceptual Gestalts: The Making and Unmaking of Others and Worlds -/- Anya Daly -/- Part III. Psychiatry, Psychopathology and Inhuman Gazes -/- 10. Values and Values-based Practice in Psychopathology: Combining Analytic and Phenomenological Approaches -/- G Stanghellini and K.W.M. (Bill) Fulford -/- 11. The Inhuman and Human Gaze in Psychiatry, Psychopathology and Schizophrenia. -/- Matthew Broome -/- 12. Overcoming the Gaze: Psychopathology, Affect, and Narrative. -/- Anna Bortolan -/- 13. From excess to exhaustion : The rise of burnout in a post-modern achievement society. -/- Philippe Wuyts -/- 14. Blackout Rages: The Inhibition of Episodic Memory in Extreme Berserker Episodes -/- John Protevi -/- Part IV. Beyond the Human: Divine, Posthuman and Animal Gazes -/- 15. Wondering at the Inhuman Gaze -/- Sean. D. Kelly -/- 16. What Counts as Human/ Inhuman Right Now? -/- Rosi Braidotti -/- 17. Beyond Human and Animal: Metamorphosis in Merleau-Ponty -/- Dylan Trigg -/- Part V. Sociality and Boundaries of the Human -/- 18. Voice and gaze considered together in ‘languaging’. -/- Fred Cummins -/- 19. Ethics Beyond the Human: Disability and The Inhuman -/- Jonathan Mitchell -/- 20. Social Invisibility and Emotional Blindness -/- James Jardine -/- 21. What are you looking at? Dissonance as a window on the autonomy of participatory sense-making frames. -/- Mark James. (shrink)

Richard Sorabji here presents a selection of his previously-published papers on four topics in ancient philosophy: two on the mind-body relation, nine on sense perception, and one each on moral conscience and on the will. The substantial introduction updates and interconnects the papers and fills out the picture by reference to other writings by himself and others, and to further thoughts. The picture of the four main topics shows that each continued to develop throughout the 1200 year course (...) of Ancient Greek Philosophy up to 600 CE. (shrink)

This is the editors' Introduction to a special issue of the journal, Multisensory Research. European philosophers of the modern period found multisensory perception to be impossible because they thought that perceptual ideas are defined by how they are experienced. Under this conception, the individual modalities are determinables of ideas—just as colour is a determinable that embraces red and blue, so also the visual is a determinable that embraces colour and (visually experienced) shape. Since no idea is experienced as, for (...) example, both visual and auditory, there can be no such thing as audiovisual perception. This conception of modality is not directly contested, but a variety of perceptual phenomena are listed that could raise interesting questions if treated as multimodal in origin. (shrink)

Perception is one of the most pervasive and puzzling problems in philosophy, generating a great deal of attention and controversy in philosophy of mind, psychology and metaphysics. If perceptual illusion and hallucination are possible, how can perception be what it intuitively seems to be, a direct and immediate access to reality? How can perception be both internally dependent and externally directed? Perception is an outstanding introduction to this fundamental topic, covering both the perennial and (...) recent work on the problem. Adam Pautz examines four of the most important theories of perception: the sense datum view; the internal physical state view; the representational view; and naïve realism, assessing each in turn. He also discusses the relationship between perception and the physical world and the issue of whether reality is as it appears. Useful examples are included throughout the book to illustrate the puzzles of perception, including hallucinations, illusions, the laws of appearance, blindsight, and neuroscientific explanations of our experience of pain, smell and color. The book covers both traditional philosophical arguments and more recent empirical arguments deriving from research in psychophysics and neuroscience. The addition of chapter summaries, suggestions for further reading and a glossary of terms make Perception essential reading for anyone studying the topic in detail, as well as for students of philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology and metaphysics. (shrink)

Seeing-as and Novelty brings together new essays that consider Wittgenstein’s treatment of the phenomenon of aspect perception in relation to the broader idea of conceptual novelty; that is, the acquisition or creation of new concepts, and the application of an acquired understanding in unfamiliar or novel situations. Over the last twenty years, aspect perception has received increasing philosophical attention, largely related to applying Wittgenstein’s remarks on the phenomena of seeing-as, found in Part II of Philosophical Investigations , to (...) issues within philosophical aesthetics. Seeing-as, however, has come to occupy a broader conceptual category, particularly in philosophy of mind and philosophical psychology. The essays in this volume examine the exegetical issues arising within Wittgenstein studies, while also considering the broader utility and implications of the phenomenon of seeing-as in the fields of aesthetics, philosophical psychology, and philosophy of mathematics, with a thematic focus on questions of novelty and creativity. The collection constitutes a fruitful interpretative engagement with the later Wittgenstein, as well as a unique contribution to considerations of philosophical methodology. (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)

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)

"Perception is not something that happens to us, or in us," writes Alva Noe. "It is something we do." In Action in Perception, Noe argues that perception and perceptual consciousness depend on capacities for action and thought — that ...

The article focuses on an unexamined so far aspect of byzantine philosophy, namely the influence of Arabic philosophy upon byzantine thinkers. Despite the vicinity of Byzantium and Arabic territories, the philosophical interactions were minimal. Scholarios claimed, in a dedicatory epistle to Constantine Paleologus (1405-1453), that he had studied the treatises of Avicenna, Averroes, and other Arab and Persian philosophers. He admitted that Averroes was beyond doubt the best commentator of Aristotle. Scholarios acknowledged that the study of the Arabs (...) contributed immensely to his philosophical education and particularly to the proper understanding of the Aristotelian philosophy (Scholarios, vii.1-6). Scholarios aimed at the enrichment and renewal of Byzantine philosophy. Besides his high esteem for Arabic philosophy, he devoted a large part of his life translating and paraphrasing the Scholastics, especially Aquinas. Despite Scolarios’ claim about his erudition on the Arab and Persian philosophers, a detailed examination of his works proves that in most cases he simply reproduced and incorporated sections from Aquinas’ works, without resorting to the original sources. Scholarios’ references to the Arabs are multiplied in his translations and compendia of Aquinas’ works, but are reduced significantly in his original texts. Frequently Scholarios refrained from mentioning the Arab philosophers, despite the fact that he commented on Aquinas’ passages, which are dedicated to Avicenna or Averroes. On the contrary, Scholarios did not avoid mentioning in detail Aquinas’ Christian or ancient Greek sources. It is obvious that Scholarios did not have a consistent approach towards Arabic philosophy. Most of the times he reproduced loosely Aquinas’ passages, where the latter commented on the Arabs. (shrink)

Pradines elaborates his philosophy of perception from a Viewpoint which is both bergsonian and anti-bergsonian. According to Pradines, it is true that Bergson had the merit of thinking perception in accordance with its vital dimension, however its is necessary to make its approach more radical. According to Pradines, this consists in constructing a philosophy of space that not only reveals the limits of bergsonism but also permits to account for intentionality of living being as an encounter (...) with a world to be runed away or conquested. Thus, the correlative appearance of spatiality and vital intelligence makes it possible to reconsider, against Bergson once again, the status of memory and also the relationship between psychology, theory of knowledge and metaphysics. (shrink)

This paper is to spell out a version of perception dualism, whose ontological description of the mind-body relation is stronger than property dualism but weaker than substance dualism, that is, to define mental events as perceptions from an internal point of view and physical events as perceptions from an external point of view, then, the author set out to tackle some long-persisting ontological issues in philosophy of mind, such as the psycho-physical interaction, the criterion of mind, the clash (...) between free will and natural necessity, Benjamin Libet’s Experiment. It also recovers some of the observations and conclusions achieved byCartesian internalism and Leibniz’s parallelism. Since perception is the most essential feature of mind, while defining mental and physical events in terms of perception, the author also develops a philosophical theory of perception. (shrink)

rentano’s theory of inner perception, evidence and truth upsets some widespread assumptions in contemporary philosophy. It rests on an unusual notion of inner perception and on a nominal theory of judgement; it attributes a central role to evidence in epistemology and treats mental states as being intrinsically true. The present contribution aims first at presenting and elucidating some of Brentano’s views on these matters. In some crucial points Brentano’s position will be modified and hopefully en- hanced in (...) a way that is compatible with the overall picture.1 Considerable space will be devoted to the examination of some of the most important objections that have been or might be raised against the position presented on Brentano’s behalf. If by far not invulnerable, the position un- der scrutiny should hopefully appear more challenging than what it is often taken to be. (shrink)

Originally published in 1964. In four essays, Professor Mandelbaum challenges some of the most common assumptions of contemporary epistemology. Through historical analyses and critical argument, he attempts to show that one cannot successfully sever the connections between philosophic and scientific accounts of sense perception. While each essay is independent of the others, and the argument of each must therefore be judged on its own merits, one theme is common to all: that critical realism, as Mandelbaum calls it, is a (...) viable epistemological position, even though some schools of thought hold it in low esteem. (shrink)

The bulk of this work is a responsible and well documented exposition of Whitehead's major themes with emphasis on how they contribute to his theory of perception and how his developing theory of perception contributes to them. Although Schmidt divides Whitehead's development into three parts, the important part of the project, and obviously his favorite, is the elucidation of Whitehead's "mature theory of perception" and the demonstration that it provides a foundation for the cosmological system and his (...) philosophy of science. Throughout, Whitehead is presented as an empiricist, although not in the usual sense. Perception and immediate experience are his starting point, but "perception" is used in a more basic, generic sense than is customary. It includes conception as well as sense-presentation. Schmidt pays prolonged and welcome attention to presentational immediacy, causal efficacy, and symbolic reference. The book contains some useful expansions of underdeveloped Whiteheadian doctrines, elucidations of Whiteheadian obscurities, and a number of interpretive distinctions, all of which serve to make it a useful new commentary as well as a proposal of an important thesis.--S. O. H. (shrink)

Mental imagery is an important topic in classical and modern philosophy, as it is central to the study of knowledge; since subjects can recall features of perceptual experiences in different ways and times, even modifying their structure, in this brief essay we will focus on non-perceptive mental images and to this purpose we will analyse, on the one hand, the nature of perceptive mental images ; on the other hand, NPMI generation according to different strategic conditions and retrieval modalities (...) and, so, their structural relationships with PMI. Thus, we will clarify what NPMI amounts to and, to this purpose, we will address the issue of epistemic correlation and semantic reference. As regards the former, we will adopt the notion of ‘belief’, both to describe which attitude supports the use of an NPMI and to account for its relationship with a PMI. As regards the latter, we will talk about weak ontology between an NPMI and the world, to conceive ‘the way in which’ mental imagery, despite the absence of a sensorial modification, refers to physical objects. As the subject’s mental contents determine, but do not constrain, what NPMI is like, we will deal with the ‘involvement’ of prior knowledge and the notion of meaningful space to underline that its generation is always the result of a wide process which involves perceptive visual information already processed and stored together with further mental contents. So, though some Authors consider mental imagery to be a ‘percept-like’ image and, somehow, espouse the theory of reactivation, we will pose a challenge to this theory – i.e. to what we call mental imagery standard framework – describing an NPMI in terms of configurational setting and indeterminacy. Consequently, we will propose a non-linear dynamic framework of mental imagery generation , according to which an NPMI is not reducible to a mere recalling of figural features of a perceptive image. (shrink)

L’article expose et discute l’un des plus importants livres récents dans le domaine de la philosophie de la religion : Perceiving God : The Epistemology of Religious Experience de William Alston. Parmi les principaux problèmes soulevés par la thèse de Alston – une défense «analytique» de l’expérience mystique de la perception de Dieu – la question de savoir si la notion de perception doit être prise littéralement ou comme une métaphore est fondamentale. À cet égard, l’article insiste sur (...) l’ambiguïté de la conception d’Alston. Dans la mesure aussi où la perception est conçue par Alston en termes de pratique établie, n’est-il pas possible de montrer que son analyse de la perception divine ne correspond qu’imparfaitement aux moments historiques où elle a joué un rôle théologique important, particulièrement dans la lignée platonicienne ? -/- This is an exposition and discusion of one of the most important of recent books in the area of philosophy of religion : Perceiving God : The Epistemology of Religious Experience, by William Alston. Among the principal problems he brings up in his “analytic” defence of the mystical experience of the perception of God, the question of knowing whether the notion of perception should be taken literally or in a metaphoric sense is fundamental. On this point, the article insists on the ambiguous nature of Alston’s concept. In that Alston thinks of perception as established practice, is it not possible to show that his analysis of divine perception corresponds rather imperfectly to the historic moments in which it has played an important theological role, particularly in the line of Platonism ? (shrink)

Are scientific enquiries directly relevant to epistemological issues? That is the question which links together the four studies comprising this work. Professor Mandelbaum answers the question in the affirmative. On the basis of this answer he rejects all phenomenalist or subjectivist notions: that we know only our states of mind or ideas. He rejects likewise any epistemology of a naïvely realist kind, which asserts that things are just as they appear to be. In their room he defends the epistemological doctrine (...) which he calls ‘critical realism’. A critical realist acknowledges that physical objects exist independently of our perception of them but insists, on the strength of scientific testimony, that not all the qualities which physical objects appear to possess are really possessed by them. On this count, Locke was a pioneer critical realist when he denied, on what he supposed to be scientific evidence, that secondary qualities inhere in objects. Mandelbaum is not committed precisely to Locke’s form of critical realism, but he believes that Locke was following the right general lines. (shrink)

In this thesis, I am arguing for a single claim, namely that perceptual experiences are judgements, and I am arguing for it in a very specific way. This has not been a popular theory, although some have defended similar theories. One main reason that this has been a historically unpopular theory is to do with the problems of conflicting beliefs. I can see the Müller-Lyer lines as being of different lengths, they look different lengths, and yet I know that they (...) are the same length. Hence, I have explicit contradictory judgements on a judgement-theory of experiences. However, despite this being the major historical obstacle, two widely held theses in the philosophy of perception in recent times also stand as an impediment to this theory, namely the theses that experiences have a phenomenal character which individuates them from judgements, and that experiences, unlike judgements or beliefs, have non-conceptual content. I seek to offer an ''incremental defence'' of the judgement-theory of experiences by arguing in stages against the competing theories, and defending the judgement-theory from the objections that arise from the motivations for these other theories. As regards the phenomenal character of experience, I argue that once the representational theory is accepted, the path is open, should a range of individuating conceptual contents for experiences be found, to analyse the psychology of experience in terms of this content. I define this conceptual content, and then I motivate and defend the theory that experiences are judgements. (shrink)

(Shoshana Smith now goes by her married name, Shoshana Brassfield: http://philpapers.org/profile/37640) Descartes famously claims that everything we perceive clearly and distinctly is true. Although this rule is fundamental to Descartes’s theory of knowledge, readers from Gassendi and Leibniz onward have complained that unless Descartes can say explicitly what clear and distinct perception is, how we know when we have it, and why it cannot be wrong, then the rule is empty. I offer a detailed analysis of clear and distinct (...) perception, showing how Descartes answers these questions. Many doubts about the usefulness of the clarity and distinctness rule arise from the mistaken assumption that in clear and distinct perception, like sense perception, we must be able to establish a correspondence between perception and reality before we can have knowledge. I show that Descartes has a different metaphysical picture of clear and distinct perception. Clear and distinct perception is direct perception, typically of essences. On this view, by relying on the intellect instead of the senses, we can have direct perception not only of our own ideas, but also of a mind-independent reality. Because clear and distinct perception is direct perception, problems of correspondence do not arise. My account of clear and distinct perception also yields unique insight into other issues in Descartes, such as the Cartesian Circle and the doctrine of the free creation of the eternal truths. Completed at the University of California, 2005. Dissertation advisers: Janet Broughton, Hannah Ginsborg, Anthony A. Long. ProQuest UMI: 3187156. (shrink)