Abstract

The greater part of this book is a careful analysis and defense of H. von Helmholtz's theory of perception. But this analysis is also meant to justify a more basic thesis, which can be seen as the central point of the work as a whole. This central thesis is the assertion of the need to return to a plausible form of epistemological realism after the long and misguided history of mind-dominated philosophy--that is to say, of Cartesian rationalism, subjective and objective idealism, phenomenology, and linguistic philosophy. The function of the long subtitle is to suggest a link between the naive realism of Aristotelian epistemology and what Meyering calls Helmholtz's "hypothetical realism."