Abstract

My thesis is that modern neurological discoveries overthrow the classical dualism which assigns all the constitutive activity of perception to the mind and leaves the body a purely passive role. The paper is in four parts: first I will present the traditional theory, using Berkeley's concept of activity as the key; then I will summarize the relevant aspects of contemporary neurology; third, the incompatibility of these two approaches will be discussed; finally, I will propose that we must reject the materialistic notion of the body and grant it a power of activity which was formerly held to be the monopoly of the mind. Throughout, I will take the spatialization of sensation as the prime example of a constitutive activity.