Molyneux’s question asks whether someone born blind, who could distinguish cubes from spheres using his tactile sensation, could recognize those objects if he received his sight. Locke says no: the newly sighted person would fail to point to the cube and call it a cube. Locke never provided a complete explanation for his negative response, and there are concerns of inconsistency with other important aspects of his theory of ideas. These charges of inconsistency rest upon an unrecognized and unfounded assumption (...) that seeing entails recognition. Locke’s negative answer to Molyneux’s question is consistent with his other philosophical commitments. (shrink)

Neste trabalho, nos propomos percorrer algumas etapas do debate sobre a relevância das causas finais nas investigações físicas, que levou Leibniz a confrontar sua filosofia, de modo particular, com o cartesianismo e, mais em geral, com uma concepção estritamente mecanicista da natureza. Serão seguidos aqueles indícios que se encontram na obra de Leibniz, ao procurar pelas referências a Molyneux, um dos primeiros a receber e divulgar a perspectiva leibniziana, e, além disso, um dos poucos interlocutores com os quais se instaurou (...) um diálogo de tons cordiais. Tentaremos mostrar que, todavia, tal troca não polêmica é fruto de um desentendimento de fundo entre os dois intelectuais. (shrink)

It is a well-worn, yet astonishingly resilient, cliché that the Enlightenment was the “Age of Reason”. By focusing on Diderot and Helvétius this paper shows that, rather than proceeding in the name of reason, key figures within the progressive philosophy of the French Enlightenment were in fact extremely suspicious of abstract reasoning and attempted to construct a philosophy which purged the faculty of reason entirely from its philosophical anthropology and reduced the mind’s functions to the single faculty of sensation and (...) so to the passions. It is in this sense that philosophy of the French Enlightenment attempted to produce a philosophy without reason. This paper reconstructs this attempt. In doing so it again engages critically with the idea that the philosophy of the Enlightenment was dogmatically rationalist, it provides a historical case study of a period in which philosophy pushed against the limits of its own identity, and it uses this attempt to reflect on the mythological not historiographical service which the cliché of Enlightenment Reason plays for the philosophical identity. (shrink)

A.D. Smith opens his excellent paper, “Space and Sight,” by remarking, One of the most notable features of both philosophy and psychology throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is the almost universal denial that we are immediately aware through sight of objects arrayed in three-dimensional space. This was not merely a denial of Direct Realism, but a denial that truly visual objects are even phenomenally presented in depth (481). Times have changed. As Smith writes, “It is hard to think of (...) a more radical reversal in thinking than the one that separates such an outlook from that which prevails today; for this erstwhile orthodoxy is hardly given even serious consideration in our own times, at least among philosophers” (482). Even so, how could this doctrine come and go? How can there be fashion in phenomenology?1 Let me answer the question indirectly, by considering Locke’s reasons for advancing the doctrine. He writes, “When we set before our Eyes a round Globe, of any uniform colour, v.g. Gold, Alabaster, or Jet, ‘tis certain, that the Idea thereby imprinted in our Mind, is of a flat Circle variously shadow’d, with several degrees of Light and Brightness coming to our Eyes” (2.9.8).2 Adults have acquired ideas of three-dimensional objects (presumably by.. (shrink)

Michael Jacovides For Locke, the first step in inquiring into perception should be reflection: “What Perception is, every one will know better by reflecting on what he does himself, when he sees, hears, feels, etc. or thinks, than by any discourse of mine” (2.9.2). As a second step, I say, we may learn from reading him. Locke’s use of the term ‘perception’ is somewhat broad. At one point, he tells us that “having Ideas and Perception” are “the same thing” (2.1.9). (...) Elsewhere, he includes the perceiving the agreement of ideas and perceiving the meaning of signs among the varieties of perception (2.21.5). What I have to say will be about perception as psychologists classify it nowadays. I will first discuss sensation in general and then elucidate some of the subtleties of Locke’s account of the visual perception of shape. I’ll close with some remarks on Locke account of time perception. (shrink)

Amongst those who answered Molyneux’s question in the negative or at least not in the positive, George Berkeley is of particular interest because he argued for a very radical position. Most of his contribution to the discussion can be found in his Essay towards a New Theory of Vision. I will give an exposition of his view (2) and then move on to a critical discussion of this kind of view, - what one could call the “Berkeleian view” (3). I (...) think that the problems of what has become a standard negative answer to the question (mainly brought forward by empiricists) become very clear in Berkeley’s case and one can also learn a lot from this. (shrink)

A quick introduction to my becoming the editor of *Berkeley Studies* in 2006.