John Smith (1618-1652), the 17th century Cambridge Platonist, employed the traditional language of the spiritual senses of the soul to develop an early modern theological aesthetic central to his religious epistemology and thus to his philosophy of religion and systematic theology. As a Christian Platonist, Smith advocated intellectual intuition of Divine Goodness as the key to theological knowledge and spiritual practice. Additionally, Smith’s theory of prophecy rests on the reception of sensible images in the imagination. Chapter one lays out (...) how Smith’s place in this tradition has been under-appreciated by scholars working on the Cambridge Platonists and the spiritual senses. Chapter two presents an interpretive summary of the spiritual senses tradition and proposes a functional typology that registers three uses of non-corporeal perception throughout the history of Christian theology: (1) accounts of the origin and methods of theological knowledge, (2) descriptions of spirituality, and (3) attempts to systematically present or defend Christian theology. Chapter three places Smith in his historical and intellectual context in early seventeenth century England noting especially how his education prepared him to contribute to the mystical tradition of the spiritual senses of the soul. Chapter four argues that Smith’s theories of theological knowledge, method, and prophecy rest on his development of the spiritual senses tradition, combining intellectual intuition and imaginative perception. Chapter five addresses the role of spiritual aesthetics in Smith’s prescriptive account of Christian piety. Here the spiritual senses are both means and reward in the spiritual life in the process of deification (theosis). Chapter six demonstrates how Smith’s theology forms a coherent system with intellectual intuition informing natural theology and revelation being supplemented by spiritual perception via the imagination. The central uniting feature therefore is the spiritual perception of theological truth. Chapter seven closes with a summary of Smith’s various uses of the spiritual senses and proposes future research on his influence upon later figures including Jonathan Edwards, John Wesley, and prospective constructive work inspired by Smith’s combination of reason and experience in religion. (shrink)

Shepherd argues that we can know that there exists a universe external to the mind because that universe is the only possible cause of our sensations. As a part of that argument, Shepherd eliminates the possibility that sensations might be caused by other sensations on the grounds that sensations are merely momentary existences and so not capable of standing in causal relations with each other. And yet she claims that sensations do stand in causal relations to other objects, both as (...) the effects of the combination of the external world, our organs of sense, and our minds, and as the partial causes of other sensations. These claims together generate a puzzle. If sensations are too fleeting to stand in causal relations with each other, how are they nonetheless capable of standing in causal relations to other objects? I suggest that because sensations exist only for a moment, to stand in synchronous causal relations with other sensations would require that the two sensations exist at precisely the same moment. But since cause and effect are identical during the moment in which they are combined, any two sensations that exist for only the moment of their combination are identical. Nothing can be its own cause, so sensations cannot be the sole cause of other sensations. Sensations can be the partial cause or effect of other objects, though, so long as those objects endure for more than a single moment. For example, external objects, organs of sense, and the mind, all exist both before and after the moments in which they combine to form a sensation. So, while their combination is identical to that sensation in that moment, all of these other objects exist outside of that moment, and that combination as well. (shrink)

Examines semantic features of perpetual demonstratives.

Having, in previous papers, distinguished at least three forms of consciousness , I now further examine their differences. This examination has some surprising results. Having argued that neither C1 nor C2 is a phenomenological state?and so different from CN?I now show that CN itself is best thought of as a subclass of a larger state . CS is the set of image?representation states. CN is that set of CS states that we are also C2 about. I argue that CN states (...) should be considered a subset of CS states because they share with other CS states imagistic representational powers as opposed to the sentential ones of C1 and C2. And I argue that there are good reasons to consider any state which utilises imagistic representation as a sensation. I then show that the notion of an unconscious sensation makes sense if we think of it as a CS state that is not C2. More radically, I conclude that either it makes sense to say that there are unfelt sensations or there are felt sensations we are not conscious about. While there are good reasons for saying one or the other of these surprising things, I argue that the second, more radical sounding, alternative is actually better motivated?and not quite so surprising as it sounds. (shrink)

I develop and defend a sense-datum theory of perception. My theory follows the spirit of classic sense-datum theories: I argue that what it is to have a perceptual experience is to be acquainted with some sense-data, where sense-data are private particulars that have all the properties they appear to have, that are common to both perception and hallucination, that constitute the phenomenal characters of perceptual experiences, and that are analogous to pictures inside one’s head. But my theory also diverges from (...) conventional sense-datum theories in some key respects: on my view, (1) sense-data are first-person presentations of neural states, (2) the sensational qualities of sense-data differ in kind from the sensible qualities of external objects, and (3) sense-data are the vehicles in virtue of which we perceive, rather than the objects that we perceive. I argue that this package of claims is appropriately labeled ‘sense-datum theory’, and that the resultant view ought to be a live contender in contemporary philosophy of perception. (shrink)

"Traité des sensations" par Etienne Bonnot de Condillac. Etienne Bonnot de Condillac était un philosophe français (1715-1780).

Haptic sensation of a material can be modulated by its visual appearance. A technique that utilizes this visual-haptic interaction is called as pseudo-haptic feedback. Conventional studies have investigated pseudo-haptic feedback in situations, wherein a user manipulated a virtual object using a computer mouse, a force-feedback device, etc. The present study investigated whether and how it was possible to offer pseudo-haptic feedback to a user who manipulated a virtual object using keystrokes. Participants moved a cursor toward a destination by pressing (...) a key. While the cursor was moving, the cursor was temporarily slowed down on a square area of the screen. The participants’ task was to report, on a five-point scale, how much resistance they felt to the cursor’s movement. In addition to the basic speed of the cursor, the ratio of the basic speed to the speed within the square area was varied. In Experiment 1, we found that these two factors interacted significantly with each other, but further analysis showed that the cursor speed within the square area was the most important determinant of perceived resistance. In Experiment 2, consistent with the results of the previous experiment, it was found that the cursor movement outside of the square area was not required to generate the sense of resistance. Counterintuitively, in Experiment 3, the sense of resistance was apparent even without user’s keystrokes. We discuss how the sense of resistance for a cursor moved by keystrokes can be triggered visually, but interpreted by the brain as a haptic impression. (shrink)

Born in 1838, Mach was a pioneer in the field of physics, having even made an impression on Einstein in his younger life who credited him with being the "Philosophical forerunner of relativity theory." His name is also associated with the speed of sound (as in traveling at Mach "insert-number-here") as well as the Doppler effect. Throughout his career, he was particularly interested in the biological and sensory relationship to physics and science, and naturally, this interest expanded to that of (...) the world of psychological perception and physiological psychology as well as philosophy. The Analysis of Sensations is about just that, the nature of the relationship of physics and the physical sciences to psychological phenomena of sense and perception. It's a fascinating read for anyone looking to expand their knowledge of how the two sides of the same coin meld harmoniously. (shrink)

Senses and Sensation: Critical and Primary Sources offers a comprehensive collection of key writings essential to anyone wishing to gain a critical understanding of sensory studies. Drawing upon historical and contemporary texts from a wide range of sources, this set is inspired by the sensory turn in the humanities, social sciences and fine arts which has challenged the monopoly that psychology formerly held over the study of senses and sensation. It also builds upon the revolution in (...) psychology and the neurosciences which has led to an increased emphasis on the interaction and integration of the senses, in place of the one-sense-at-a-time approach. The four volumes include 99 essays from the humanities, social sciences, fine arts, biology, psychology and the neurosciences. Ordered by discipline, the volumes cover geography and anthropology, history and sociology, biology, psychology and neuroscience, and art and design. Each volume is separately introduced and the essays structured into coherent sections on specific themes. This work is a major scholarly resource for those working and studying in the multidisciplinary field of sensory studies. (shrink)

The Cartesian explanation of sensation includes a speculative account of how external and internal phenomena transmit information to the brain by triggering flows of animal spirits from the pineal gland. The distinctive patterns in the flow of spirits are called ‘ideas’. There is no reason to think that ideas resemble the realities that cause them. All animals have sensations in this sense, and exhibit corresponding behaviour.

Can an understanding be formed of how sensory experience might be presented or manipulated in visual art in order to promote a relational concept of the senses, in opposition to the customary, capitalist notion of sensation as a private possession, as a sensory impression that is mine? I ask the question in the light of recent visual art theory and practice which pursue relational, ecological ambitions. As Arnold Berleant, Nicolas Bourriaud, and Grant Kester see it, ecological ambition and (...) artistic form should correspond, but they fail to recognize sensation as a site where the ecological cause can be fought. Jacques Rancière argues for the political force of the senses, but his distribution of the sensible does not address the particularity of sensory experience. I identify the difference between these approaches within recent relational or ecological aesthetics and my position on sensibility, and indicate some of the problems involved in referring to the senses. I set out the concepts that are central to the cultivation of relational sensibility: style, autofiguration, and the mobility of sensory meaning, extrapolated from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of Paul Cézanne. They amount to positioning the senses ontologically as movements along lines of conceptual-sensory connection and implication, based on the transfer of meanings created artistically through style and autofiguration. (shrink)

Sensation of Movement explores the role of sensation in motor control, bodily self-recognition and sense of agency. The sensation of movement is dependent on a range of information received by the brain, from signalling in the peripheral sensory organs to the establishment of higher order goals. Through the integration of neuroscientific knowledge with psychological and philosophical perspectives, this book questions whether one type of information is more relevant for the ability to sense and control movement. Addressing conscious (...) sensations of movement, experimental designs and measures, and the possible functions of proprioceptive and kinaesthetic information in motor control and bodily cognition, the book advocates the integration of neuroscientific knowledge and philosophical perspectives. With an awareness of the diverse ideas and theories from these distinct fields, the book brings together leading researchers to bridge these divides and lay the groundwork for future research. -/- Contributors: Thor Grünbaum and Mark Schram Christensen Andreas Kalckert Myrto Mylopoulos Mads Jensen, Mia Dong, Mikkel C. Vinding, and Morten Overgaard Anne Kavounoudias Matthew R. Longo Hong Yu Wong. (shrink)

Prologue : narratocracy and the contours of political life -- From nomos to nomad : Kant, Deleuze, and Rancière on sensation -- The piazza, the edicola, and the noise of the utterance -- Machiavelli's theory of sensation and Florence's vita festiva -- The viewing subject : Caravaggio, Bacon, and the ring -- "You're eating too fast!" slow food's ethos of convivium -- Epilogue : "the photographs tell it all" : on an ethics of appearance.

This paper proposes a new framework for investigating neural signals sufficient for a conscious sensation of movement and their role in motor control. We focus on signals sufficient for proprioceptive awareness, particularly from muscle spindle activation and from primary motor cortex (M1). Our review of muscle vibration studies reveals that afferent signals alone can induce conscious sensations of movement. Similarly, studies employing peripheral nerve blocks suggest that efferent signals from M1 are sufficient for sensations of movement. On this basis, (...) we show that competing theories of motor control assign different roles to sensation of movement. According to motor command theories, sensation of movement corresponds to an estimation of the current state based on afferent signals, efferent signals, and predictions. In contrast, within active inference architectures, sensations correspond to proprioceptive predictions driven by efferent signals from M1. The focus on sensation of movement provides a way to critically compare and evaluate the two theories. Our analysis offers new insights into the functional roles of movement sensations in motor control and consciousness. (shrink)

It is the ambition of evolutionary psychology to explain how the basic features of human mental life came to be selected because of their contribution to biological survival. Counted among the most basic must be the subjective qualities of conscious sensory experience: the felt redness we experience on looking at a ripe tomato, the felt saltiness on tasting an anchovy, the felt pain on being pricked by a thorn. But, as many theorists acknowledge, with these qualia, the ambition of evolutionary (...) psychology may have met its match. Everyone agrees that a trait can only contribute to an organism's biological survival in so far as it operates in the public domain. Yet almost everyone also agrees that the subjective quality of sensory experience is (at least for all practical purposes) private and without external influence. Then, maybe we must either concede that the subjective quality of sensations cannot after all have been determined by selection (even if this is theoretically depressing) or else demonstrate that the quality of sensations is not as private as it seems to be (even if this is intuitively unconvincing). No. I believe neither of these solutions to the puzzle is in fact the right one. I argue instead that the truth is that the quality of sensations has indeed been shaped by selection in the past, despite the fact that it is today effectively private. And this situation has come about as a result of a remarkable evolutionary progression, whereby the primitive activity of sensing slowly became "privatized" - that is to say, removed from the domain of overt public behavior and transformed into a mental activity that is now, in humans, largely if not exclusively internal to the subject's mind. (shrink)

In the opening section of this paper we spell out an account of our na ve view of bodily sensations that is of historical and philosophical significance. This account of our shared view of bodily sensations captures common ground between Descartes, who endorses an error theory regarding our everyday thinking about bodily sensations, and Berkeley, who is more sympathetic with common sense. In the second part of the paper we develop an alternative to this account and discuss what is at (...) stake in deciding between these two ways of understanding our everyday view. In the third and final part of the paper we offer an argument in favour of our alternative. (shrink)

For Reid, the external senses have a “double province.” They give rise to both sensation and perception. This essay is about the relation of sensation and perception, a relation Reid’s sign theory of sensations describes. Drawing on Reid’s distinctions between general and particular principles of our constitution, relative and absolute conceptions, and original and acquired perception, the paper systematizes Reid’s sporadic comments on the sign theory. The aim is to offer an interpretation which reveals the overall structure, (...) rationale and coherence of Reid’s sign theory. (shrink)

For Reid, sensations do not enter into the analysis of perception proper. Instead they “intervene” between the effects of bodily qualities on our sense organs and our perception of those qualities (Inq VI xxi, 174).1 The question addressed in this essay is: What sort of thing does Reid take this interloper to be?2 The answer defended is that sensations are reflexive mental acts, i.e., acts which take themselves as objects.

The much neglected "fifth sense" provides the subject matter for this analytical study. The author distinguishes two kinds of perception associated with this sense, perception by touch and perception of bodily state, and gives an account of the nature of the sensations proper to each. The latter are divided into intransitive bodily sensations and transitive bodily sensations. The greater part of the book is devoted to developing the thesis that bodily sensations can be interpreted as sense impressions of occurrences in (...) our own body.--R. H. K. (shrink)

Additional arguments for sense‐data begin by defending the claim that perceptual sensations are psychological individuals, examples being phosphenes, after‐images, and the ‘ringings’ of ‘tinnitus’. Five arguments for sense‐data follow. First, that since corresponding to every veridical visual field is a possible non‐veridical visual field of sensations, the latter merely needs a different and regular outer cause to be deemed veridical. Second, since bodily sensation experience is extremely strong evidence for the existence of a matching sensation cause, the experience (...) of ‘ringing’ must be strong evidence that a ‘ringing’ sensation is its cause, and this holds in the veridical hearing of a ringing sound. Third, that it is inconceivable that one has a truly visual experience of a red visual field, and absolutely nothing red‐looking be there before one had noticed. Fourth, that the experience of sound might have had a different developmental history, in which first there was merely experience of auditory sensation, and then over millennia such experience gradually found itself caused by regular outer phenomena, thereby constituting the hearing of sound. And a fifth argument that resembles the first argument. (shrink)

How ought we differentiate the senses? What, say, distinguishes vision from audition? The question comes in two versions. First, there is the traditional problem of individuating the senses in humans. Second, there is also an important question about what sensory modalities we ought to attribute to non-human animals, a version of the question that has been virtually ignored by philosophers. Modality ought to be construed as an “avenue into” an organism for information external to the central nervous system. (...) Six proposed criteria found in the philosophical literature concerning the senses are reviewed. Initially, four criteria—physics, neurobiology, behavior, and evolutionary or developmental dedication—are shown to be individually necessary and jointly sufficient. Next, two criteria—Aristotle's proper objects of sensation criterion and Grice's sensation or qualia criterion—are considered and rejected. One overarching goal here is to show that there is interesting contemporary work left to be done on this ancient philosophical question. (shrink)

Contemporary readers of Descartes can hardly fail to notice that the author uses the word pensée, or cogitatio, in a much broader sense than French speakers use pensée nowadays, or we use the closest English word, thought. He consistently maintains that feelings, sensations, as well as the products of one's fancy, are one and all modes of thought.Yet, clearly, according to the normal use of the word, sensations of light, of sound, of hunger, and so forth, are not regarded as (...) part of one's thinking, nor do we so regard the spontaneous flight of the imagination one might experience in daydreams or real dreams, or while thinking about unrelated matters. Some of these sensations, notably aches, pains, pangs of hunger, blinding light, and strong noise, are not only not counted among our thoughts, but they are apt to interfere with our thinking, and, in extreme cases, might stop it altogether. In a similar way, the lascivious play of St. Antony's imagination did not embellish his meditations on the holy mysteries; he had to overcome or ignore it to be able to pursue the train of his thought. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the target article “How and Why the Brain Lays the Foundations for a Conscious Self” by Martin V. Butz. Excerpt: I would like to highlight a mechanism that is vital for the anticipating self: the formation of sensations detached from the current environment. Without a sensing self it would be impossible to project oneself into possible futures of a certain kind – futures that are simulated in the kind of inner world that provides the subject with (...) affective experiences . (shrink)

The Inner Touch presents the archaeology of a single sense: the sense of being sentient. Aristotle was perhaps the first to define this faculty when in his treatise On the Soul he identified a sensory power, irreducible to the five senses, by which animals perceive that they are perceiving: the simple "sense," as he wrote, "that we are seeing and hearing." After him, thinkers returned, time and again, to define and redefine this curious sensation. The classical Greek and (...) Roman philosophers as well as the medieval Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin thinkers who followed them all investigated a power they called "the common sense," which one ancient author likened to "a kind of inner touch, by which we are able to grasp ourselves." Their many findings were not lost with the waning of the Middle Ages. From Montaigne and Francis Bacon to Locke, Leibniz, and Rousseau, from nineteenth-century psychiatry and neurology to Proust and Walter Benjamin, the writers and thinkers of the modern period have turned knowingly and unknowing to the terms of older traditions in exploring the perception that every sensitive being possesses of its life.The Inner Touch reconstructs and reconsiders the history of this perception. In twenty-five concise chapters that move freely among ancient, medieval, and modern cultures, Daniel Heller-Roazen investigates a set of exemplary phenomena that have played central roles in philosophical, literary, psychological, and medical accounts of the nature of animal existence. Here sensation and self-sensation, sleeping and waking, aesthetics and anesthetics, perception and apperception, animal nature and human nature, consciousness and unconsciousness, all acquire a new meaning.The Inner Touch proposes an original, elegant, and far-reaching philosophical inquiry into a problem that has never been more pressing: what it means to feel that one is alive.Winner of the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies. (shrink)

This path-breaking book examines our attitudes to the senses from antiquity through to the present day.

The article discusses the relevance of sensor-technologies as media. Beyond technical affordances sensors act as agents of implementing and activating a more-than-human sensorium within encompassing technoecologies of sensation. Outlining the onto-epistemological implications of being ‘in touch with’ sensor-media, the contribution raises questions of what it means to be included in an infrastructure of sensorial interfaces - not only of tech-assisted human-to-human or human-to-machine communication, but of unmanageable processes of machine-to-machine exchange. Delineating sensors as media necessitates reflections on the temporal (...) relations that define the ‘contemporary condition’ of intensified global computation, technological interconnectedness and the ontogenesis of sensor-media milieus, their respective temporalities and concomitant aesthetics of experienced time. (shrink)

Accounting for qualia in the natural world is a difficult business, and it is worth understanding why. A close examination of several theories of mind—Behaviorism, Identity Theory, Functionalism, and Integrated Information Theory—will be discussed, revealing shortcomings for these theories in explaining the contents of conscious experience: qualia. It will be argued that in order to overcome the main difficulty of these theories the senses should be interpreted as physical detectors. A new theory, Grounded Functionalism, will be proposed, which retains (...) multiple realizability while allowing for a scientifically based approach toward accounting for qualia in the natural world. (shrink)

A concise articulation of Neurobiological Emergence -- a theory that solves the "hard problem" of consciousness while also showing its widespread existence in nature (beyond just humans).

A Sense of Beauty -- Hearing -- Seeing -- Touching -- Tasting -- Smelling -- Epilogue.

Although the body has been the focus of much contemporary cultural theory, the models that are typically applied neglect the most salient characteristics of embodied existence—movement, affect, and sensation—in favor of concepts derived from linguistic theory. In _Parables for the Virtual_ Brian Massumi views the body and media such as television, film, and the Internet, as cultural formations that operate on multiple registers of sensation beyond the reach of the reading techniques founded on the standard rhetorical and semiotic (...) models. Renewing and assessing William James’s radical empiricism and Henri Bergson’s philosophy of perception through the filter of the post-war French philosophy of Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault, Massumi links a cultural logic of variation to questions of movement, affect, and sensation. If such concepts are as fundamental as signs and significations, he argues, then a new set of theoretical issues appear, and with them potential new paths for the wedding of scientific and cultural theory. Replacing the traditional opposition of literal and figural with new distinctions between stasis and motion and between actual and virtual, _Parables for the Virtual _tackles related theoretical issues by applying them to cultural mediums as diverse as architecture, body art, the digital art of Stelarc, and Ronald Reagan’s acting career. The result is an intriguing combination of cultural theory, science, and philosophy that asserts itself in a crystalline and multi-faceted argument. _Parables for the Virtual_ will interest students and scholars of continental and Anglo-American philosophy, cultural studies, cognitive science, electronic art, digital culture, and chaos theory, as well as those concerned with the “science wars” and the relation between the humanities and the sciences in general. (shrink)

The years between 1833 and 1945 fundamentally transformed science’s understanding of the body’s inner senses, revolutionizing fields like philosophy, the social sciences, and cognitive science. In How We Became Sensorimotor, Mark Paterson provides a systematic account of this transformative period, while also demonstrating its substantial implications for current explorations into phenomenology, embodied consciousness, the extended mind, and theories of the sensorimotor, the body, and embodiment. -/- Each chapter of How We Became Sensorimotor takes a particular sense and historicizes its (...) formation by means of recent scientific studies, case studies, or coverage in the media. Ranging among a diverse array of sensations, including balance, fatigue, pain, the “muscle sense,” and what Maurice Merleau-Ponty termed “motricity,” Paterson’s analysis moves outward from the familiar confines of the laboratory to those of the industrial world and even to wild animals and their habitats. He uncovers important stories, such as how forgotten pain measurement schemes transformed criminology, or how Penfield’s outmoded concepts of the sensory and motor homunculi of the brain still mar psychology textbooks. -/- Complete with original archival research featuring illustrations and correspondence, How We Became Sensorimotor shows how the shifting and sometimes contested historical background to our understandings of the senses are being extended even today. (shrink)

This essay is an examination of how sensing capacities can draw in, and from, other-than-human entities—both animate and inanimate. Based upon ethnographic field research in Iceland, it describes sensory encounters that are realizable through the bodies, sensations, and ontological status shifts of other beings and entities, namely, in bears and ice and earth. As anthropogenic impacts deepen, the essay argues, sensing ought to be practiced as a collaborative effort among human and other-than-human entities. Sensing by other means entails sensing through (...) others’ means and beyond the human sensorium. (shrink)

Phenomenology and logical positivism both subscribed to an empirical-verifiability criterion of mental or linguistic meaning. The acceptance of this criterion confronted them with the same problem: how to understand the Other as a subject with his own experience, if the existence and nature of the Other's experiences cannot be verified. Husserl tackled this problem in the Cartesian Meditations, but he could not reconcile the verifiability criterion with understanding the Other's feelings and sensations. Carnap's solution was to embrace behaviorism and eliminate (...) the idea of private sensations, but behaviorism has well-known difficulties. Heidegger broke this impasse by suggesting that each person's being included being-with, an innate capacity for understanding the Other. To be human is to be "hardwired" to make sense of the Other without having to verify the Other's private sensations. I suggest that being-with emerged from an evolutionary imperative for conspecific animals to recognize each other and to coordinate their activities. Wittgenstein also rejected the verifiability criterion. He theorized that the meaning of a term is its usage and that terms about private sensations were meaningful because they have functions in our language-games. For example, "I'm in pain," like a cry of pain, functions to get the attention of others and motivate others to help. Wittgenstein's theory shows how Dasein's being-with includes "primitive" adaptive behavior such as cries, smiles, and threatening or playful gesture. As Dasein is acculturated, these behaviors are partially superseded by functionally equivalent linguistic expressions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.4 (2003) 26-32 [Access article in PDF] A Sense of Reality In the current highly information-oriented society, electronic media have entered into our daily lives ever so naturally, even unnoticeably, yet their great influence on us is beyond measure. In addition to the many ways that information surrounds us in our everyday lives, we are also exposed to information from outer space via television; (...) computer networks; the surveillance satellite, Landsat; and the weather satellite, Himawari. The means ofunderstanding the "world" no longer come through our own bodies or through immediate involvement with phenomena. Instead, our experience via technologies of information is now mainly indirect. The changes in the [End Page 26] structure of experience have effectuated diverse influences on people, raising problems both within individuals and in society.This essay was written as an introduction to the exhibition "A Sense of Reality," held at the Utsunomiya Museum of Art in the summer of 1999. The purpose of this exhibition was to question the new relationship betweenmedia art and today's society, and the relationship between electronic media and human beings.For this exhibition, based on "sense" and "language," our objective was to examine the transformation of our bodily sensations and the state of "the self," including the changing relations between the two and in the present computerized society. The exhibition has been constructed to have the viewers interact directly with the exhibited works. The works by four artists and two groups cover a wide range of expression, from an installation using a video projector, to digital prints of a virtual space using a computer. Body Absorbed into Media "Lovers," a collaboration by Teiji Furuhashi and Artlab, was first exhibited in 1994 at Hillside Plaza in Tokyo, and has since traveled to various countries. This work can be seen as a work depicting the present state of "information" and "body" with the strongest determination, while also superbly revealing the present-day problems in relation to these. When the viewers entered the virtual space constructed by the electronic media, their living bodies were projected as images. Through intertwining and assimilating sensations both through and about the body, the feeling of merging into an imaginary world at some point creates a sense of bodily unification.This world, originated as a vessel for the "mother of electronics," thatblessed us with "eternal love," was the last device created by Teiji Furuhashi, who had a premonition of his own death. Except for the floor, which was made of white linoleum, the dark space was covered with a black cloth, ten meters in length and width, and six meters in height. A tower-shaped object was installed in the center of the floor. On the tower were video and slide projectors with sensors, which continuously showed the images of nine women and men on the walls and ceiling. The viewers encountered the life-size images that appeared from nowhere, and were compelled to interact with these images. The incidents that took place inside the dark, rectangular space enabled the viewers to actualize various encounters and partings with the images of naked bodies.Though the viewers felt as if they were dreaming or hallucinating, they had an uncanny sensation that the memory of this experience would become manifest deep inside their bodies. "Lovers" was an extraordinary interactive work that fully utilized electronic media, but was uncommon in that the technology was hardly noticeable. This work signified the future state of "the body and media," or "the body absorbed into media." The [End Page 27] work also urged us to recreate a humanistic relationship with the electronic media. Neutral Mind-Body Today, we are surrounded by a variety of electronic media, most of which are beyond the world of art. Many have already become essential devices in our daily lives. The widespread proliferation of electronic media such as video products, CDs, mobile phones, and devices which use information from satellites, have brought about convenient changes in our living environment and in communication. Real-time information, bi-directional information, and other electronic networks circle the globe.Electronic media have... (shrink)

It might at first seem that the senses (the five traditionally recognized conduits of outer sense) would have very little to contribute to an investigation of Kant's aesthetics. Is not Kant's aesthetic theory based on a relation of the higher cognitive faculties? Much however can be revealed by asking to what degree sight is essential to aesthetic judgment (of beauty and the sublime) as Kant describes it in the 'Critique of Judgment.' Here the sublime receives particular attention.

Despite the high profile of evolutionary explanations of human behaviour, their status remains highly disputed. Are all evolutionary explanations of human behaviour sensational 'just so' stories, or is there a proper science of sociobiology? Sense and Nonsense provides an answer to this question by assessing the legitimacy of a range of evolutionary approaches to human behaviour.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.1 (2001) 49-75 [Access article in PDF] Sensible Ends:Latent Teleology in Descartes' Account of Sensation Alison Simmons One of Descartes' hallmark contributions to natural philosophy is his denunciation of teleology. It is puzzling, then, to find him arguing in Meditation VI that human beings have sensations in order to preserve the union of mind and body (AT VII 83). 1 This appears (...) to be just the sort of teleological explanation that he proscribes. Descartes' Anglo-American commentators have had little to say about the teleological overtones of his claims about sensation. His French commentators acknowledge these overtones, but seem largely untroubled by them. 2 It is worth pausing to be troubled, for a closer analysis reveals that Descartes' famous proscription against teleology is not as simple as it is generally thought to be. In the first half of this essay, I argue that Descartes advocates a genuinely teleological conception of the senses. My aim is not to charge Descartes with employing illicit teleology, but to argue that there is a place for teleology even in his revisionist natural philosophy. Accordingly, in the second half of this essay, I argue that Descartes' assault on teleological explanation is [End Page 49] not a sweeping assault on finality, but a more directed attack on particular uses of ends in natural philosophy. Descartes' assault leaves standing a form of teleological explanation that proves crucial to his own treatment of sensation. 1. Descartes' Rejection of Teleological Explanation at a Glance A teleological explanation is one that purports to account for something in terms of its ends or its function relative to the ends of the system of which it is a part. Aristotle's physics provides many classic examples: plants produce leaves for the protection of their fruit; spiders spin webs in order to catch food; animals grow sharp front teeth and dull back teeth in order to facilitate biting and chewing respectively; eyes are for seeing. According to Aristotle, all natural phenomena are directed toward ends and no explanation is complete without a teleological component that specifies the end for the sake of which the phenomenon occurs. Indeed ends take explanatory priorityover other causes: "Both causes [the end and the matter] must be stated by the student of nature, but especially the end; for that is the cause of the matter, not vice versa." 3 And: [T]he causes concerned in natural generation are, as we see, more than one. There is the cause for the sake of which [the end], and the cause whence the beginning of motion comes [the efficient cause]. Now we must decide which of these two causes comes first, which second. Plainly, however, that cause is the first which we call that for the sake of which. For this is the account of the thing, and the account forms the starting-point.4In other words, Aristotle argues that natural substances have the matter they do, have the parts or organs they do, are organized as they are and act as they do for the sake of their ends. To explain why things are as they are, the natural philosopher must therefore explain the ways in which they contribute to ends.Among the late scholastic Aristotelians familiar to Descartes there is considerable debate concerning the causal efficacy of ends. Genuine final causation, in which something is said to be acted on by an end, is limited to the intentional behavior of rational agents who consciously recognize their ends: only something that recognizes an end can be "moved" by one. Even here the sort of causation involved is peculiar: a rational agent is "moved" by an end insofar as the end induces a "metaphorical motion" toward (or desire for) the end in the agent's will. 5 While these scholastic Aristotelians resist attributing final causation [End Page 50] to non-rational creatures, they nevertheless persist in attributing ends to them. When Toletus, Rubio, the Coimbrans and Suarez take up the question whether nature acts propter finem, each answers it affirmatively: natural... (shrink)

A theory of sense‐data is defended, which takes its cue from light. It is that the visual perception of outer physical objects is noticing visual sensations set in two‐dimensional body‐relative physical space, which stands in non‐deviant causal relation to outer phenomenal causes. The first leg of the argument is that there exist regular causally sufficient bodily conditions for the existence of a visual field of given colour‐bright spatial character, quite irrespective of the outer causes of those bodily causes. Now if (...) those bodily conditions were caused by piecemeal scientific intervention we would deem the resulting visual field a psychological existent of type, visual sensations. Since they are also satisfied when the bodily conditions are caused by outer visibles, the same set of sensations must occur in perception of outer items. The theory is defended against the claim that the visual field has no separate existence from our awareness of it, through showing that the criteria for the content of visual field and of visual impression ensure divergence of content. Finally, an explanatorial argument is proposed for the view that sensations generally are psychological individuals, and are not to be understood as merely the internal objects of awareness‐experiences. (shrink)

My dissertation covers a number of different topics in Kant scholarship, but is driven by one central question: how do our sense-based capacities to perceive, desire, and feel relate to our capacity to reason? I take the answer to this question to be key to understanding much about Kant’s philosophical system. For topics as diverse as the role that sensation plays in practical knowledge, the character of moral motivation, the nature of evil, or Kant’s theory that we are morally (...) required to believe in our immortality and God’s existence, I claim that the correct reading turns on a novel approach to the relation between our rational and sensitive capacities. To properly understand this relation, we must overcome the deeply entrenched thought that Kant inherits his conception of reason from the rationalists, and his conception of sense experience from the empiricists. This would be to adopt a fundamentally dualistic philosophy, on which reason and the senses are independently intelligible and sometimes even diametrically opposed. On Kant’s actual view, our capacities to perceive, feel, and desire are metaphysically interdependent with and thus not intelligible in isolation from our capacity to reason. Developing the details of this more unified position leads to satisfying philosophical accounts of a number of controversial issues in Kant scholarship that have suffered under a dualistic framework. (shrink)

On the old story about early modern philosophy, Descartes is a “rationalist” who devalues the senses, and Berkeley an “empiricist” who rejects this. Berkeley plays into this story in his Notebooks, where he writes: “in vindication of the senses effectually to confute wt Descartes saith in ye last par. of the last Med: viz. that the senses oftener inform him falsly than truely”. But when we turn to this “last par.,” we find Descartes maintaining that “my (...) class='Hi'>senses report the truth much more frequently than not”. In this paper, I draw on recent commentary to outline Descartes' positive account of sensation. I then look carefully at Berkeley's account of the same, in particular, by considering his distinction between human and divine perception and his account of the laws of nature. In so doing, I suggest that there are noteworthy parallels between Descartes' and Berkeley's accounts with respect to the function of sensation and the ways in which sensations can fulfill this function. I conclude by sketching some ways in which this understanding of Berkeley can illuminate some aspects of Berkeley scholarship. (shrink)

It seems undeniable that we have both sense experience of primary qualities and sense experience of secondary qualities, and yet, based on a text in the Sixth Replies among others, many commentators have thought that Descartes denied precisely this for primary qualities. One of the main burdens of this chapter is to show that Descartes does have an account of the sense experience of primary qualities and that it is to be found in Descartes's account of the faculty of imagination. (...) The chapter argues that a version of the proof of the external world depends on a special class of ideas of this faculty. There are two sides to Descartes's account: the philosophical theory of ideas, including the taxonomy of perceptual responses developed in the Sixth Replies of the Meditations, and the empirical theory in the Optics and the Treatise on Man, and they are both treated in depth here. Finally, the chapter argues that Descartes has an empirical and philosophical account of the phenomenological fusion of primary and secondary qualities, the former accomplished by means of images in the corporeal imagination and the mechanism of referred sensations in The Passions of the Soul. (shrink)

From the winds of Mars to a baby's first laugh, a prolific philosopher-composer reflects on the profound imperative of sound in everyday life. Experiencing Sound presents its subject, the one sense we can never stop using, as fundamental to all experience-sensation, perception, and understanding. Lawrence Kramer turns on its head the widespread notion that vision takes pride of place among the senses and demonstrates how paying attention to sound can transform how we make meaning out of experience. Through (...) a series of brief, lyrical forays, Experiencing Sound shows that sound is the object of a primary need and an essential component in the sensation of being alive and the perception of time. It is something that we may suffer-or be made to suffer-as well as enjoy. Like its predecessor, The Hum of the World, this book ranges widely across music, philosophy, literature, art, media, and history, from classical antiquity to the present, as it invites us to experience sound anew. (shrink)

The difficulty about the naive realism which most people take for granted and which some empirical philosophers try to defend is that its proponents, in seeking to preserve the objective world of common sense, virtually read out of the picture the contribution of the perceiving subject and all that is involved in the relatedness of sense experience. The visual phenomena of perspective, distortion and hallucination, and the dependence of all other sense experience upon varying physiological factors in the percipient make (...) it well nigh impossible to believe that everything is just what we observe it to be; and the physicist's account of a world of electrical charges symbolized by mathematical formulae deals in conceptual terms which transcend sensual imagery. The resort to the sense-datum theory was but a desperate attempt on the part of philosophers to preserve the plain man's view of reality, though it left wholly obscure the relationship between the world of common sense experience and that of physical science, as well as positing a fantastic multiplication of entities corresponding to everything that could be observed under any circumstances. (shrink)

Experiences of all kinds have a distinctive character, which marks them out as intrinsically different from states of consciousness such as thinking. A plausible view is that the difference should be accounted for by the fact that, in having an experience, the subject is somehow immediately aware of a range of phenomenal qualities. For example, in seeing, grasping and tasting an apple, the subject may be aware of a red and green spherical shape, a certain feeling of smoothness to touch, (...) and a sweet sensation. Such phenomenal qualities are also immediately present in hallucinations. According to the sense-data theory, phenomenal qualities belong to items called “sense-data.” In having a perceptual experience the subject is directly aware of, or acquainted with, a sense-datum, even if the experience is illusory or hallucinatory. The sense-datum is an object immediately present in experience. It has the qualities it appears to have. (shrink)