Does Visual Spatial Awareness Require the Visual Awareness of Space?

Mind and Language 27 (3):308-329 (2012)
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Abstract

Many philosophers have held that it is not possible to experience a spatial object, property, or relation except against the background of an intact awareness of a space that is somehow ‘absolute’. This paper challenges that claim, by analyzing in detail the case of a brain-damaged subject whose visual experiences seem to have violated this condition: spatial objects and properties were present in his visual experience, but space itself was not. I go on to suggest that phenomenological argumentation can give us a kind of evidence about the nature of the mind even if this evidence is not absolutely incorrigible

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John Schwenkler
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Citations of this work

Many Molyneux Questions.Mohan Matthen & Jonathan Cohen - 2020 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 98 (1):47-63.
Do things look the way they feel?John Schwenkler - 2013 - Analysis 73 (1):86-96.
Object Seeing and Spatial Perception.Craig French - 2018 - In Fiona Macpherson & Fabian Dorsch (eds.), Phenomenal Presence. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 134-162.

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References found in this work

Critique of Pure Reason.I. Kant - 1787/1998 - Philosophy 59 (230):555-557.
Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy.Edmund Husserl - 1980 - Hingham, MA, USA: Distributors for the U.S. and Canada, Kluwer Boston.
Studies of interference in serial verbal reactions.J. R. Stroop - 1935 - Journal of Experimental Psychology 18 (6):643.
Critique of pure reason.Immanuel Kant - 2007 - In Elizabeth Schmidt Radcliffe, Richard McCarty, Fritz Allhoff & Anand Vaidya (eds.), Late modern philosophy: essential readings with commentary. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 449-451.

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