The paper demonstrates that a detailed analysis of Hegel’s criticism of rationalist metaphysics in the “Vorbegriff” (Preliminary Conception) chapter of the Encyclopedia Logic can shed light on the following critical features of Hegel’s metaphysics: (1) advancing semantic holism as an alternative to semantic atomism; (2) renouncing the projection of a substance-attribute formal structure onto actuality; (3) dismissing sense perception as the source of conceptual content; and (4) rejecting dualist ontology.

A History of Scottish Philosophy is a series of collaborative studies by expert authors, each volume being devoted to a specific period. Together they provide a comprehensive account of the Scottish philosophical tradition, from the centuries that laid the foundation of the remarkable burst of intellectual fertility known as the Scottish Enlightenment, through the Victorian age and beyond, when it continued to exercise powerful intellectual influence at home and abroad. The books aim to be historically informative, while at the same (...) time serving to renew philosophical interest in the problems with which the Scottish philosophers grappled and in the solutions they proposed. This is a companion volume to Scottish Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century, Volume I. Where Volume I covered Scottish Enlightenment contributions to morals, politics, art, and religion, this second volume covers philosophical method, metaphysics, and the philosophy of mind. It includes a comprehensive account of the teaching of philosophy in Scottish universities in the eighteenth century. Particular attention is given to Scottish achievements in the science of the mind in chapters on perception, the intellectual powers, the active powers, habit and the association of ideas, and language. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the relationship between the general metaphysics of the Critique of Pure Reason and the special metaphysics of the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. Kant claims that what distinguishes the latter from the former is that the latter presupposes an empirical concept, namely the concept of matter, whereas the former does not. It is argued that the concept of matter is empirical not in any ordinary sense, but in the sense that it requires actual perceptible (...) objects to be given. Only the system of contingently given, empirical objects of the solar system as described by Newtonian physics, satisfies this requirement. This interpretation suggests that “experience”, whose possibility Kant is exploring in the first Critique, is exclusively “scientific experience”, and that the task of theoretical philosophy thus lies primarily in understanding the conceptual presuppositions of scientific experience. (shrink)

In this thesis, I examine the perceptibility of the Platonic Ideas in the thought of Arthur Schopenhauer. The work is divided into four chapters, each focusing and building upon a specific aspect related to this question. The first chapter (“"Plato and the Primacy of Intellect"”) deals with Schopenhauer’s interpretation specific to Platonic thought. I there address the question of why it is that Schopenhauer should consider Plato to have interpreted the Ideas as 'perceptible', particularly in view of evidence which (...) seems to testify to the contrary. Does Schopenhauer misinterpret Plato, or are there sufficient grounds for considering his interpretation consistent? This is important in light of Schopenhauer’s reinterpretation of the Platonic Idea on the basis of the primacy of the will in contradistinction to Plato’'s own emphasis upon the intelligible. In effect, for Schopenhauer, Plato confuses the nature of imperceptible concepts with the more perceptually grounded Ideas. In the second chapter (“"On the Direct Path to Knowledge"”), I explore Schopenhauer’'s methodological approach on the basis of the will. I there discuss the difference between Schopenhauer and Kant with respect to Transcendental Idealism, particularly in terms of their separate analysis and derivation of the thing-in-itself. From there, I turn to a consideration of Schopenhauer'’s discussion of the nature of formal and empirical intuitions, of abstraction and the nature of universal concepts, and finally of the intuitively grounded nature of mathematical demonstration which serves as an analogy for the manner in which Schopenhauer deals with knowledge of the Ideas. In the third chapter ("“The Perceptibility of the Ideas”"), I discuss the manner in which the Ideas become accessible as the manifestation of the Will, arising through the representation of perception. There a number of distinctions are made between Ideas and concepts, as well as the nature of contemplation through Genius. The Ideas are found to be perceptible as aesthetic intuitions which relate not only to the in-itself nature inherent to phenomena, but serve also as the essential basis and foundation for all genuine forms of art. In the fourth and final chapter (“"Critical Discussion of Schopenhauer’s Ideas"”), I consider and outline a number of potential problems with respect to Schopenhauer’s analysis. In particular, Schopenhauer encounters difficulties on the basis of the simultaneous immanence and transcendence of the Ideas; of the knowledge of the Ideas characterized as intuitive while yet having a strangely abstract basis; of the unity of the will in face of the plurality of Ideas and phenomena; and finally of the annihilation of the will which creates essential problems in terms of the desideratum of knowledge itself. I here also attempt to offer various solutions to these problems where relevant. The conclusion which I arrive at in this work is that any radical reorientation of ontology must bear an essential effect upon the character and methodology of knowledge itself. In other words, Schopenhauer’s interpretation of the perceptibility of the Ideas is a direct consequence of hi s analysis of the will as the metaphysical thing-in-itself. In fact, this essential change colors his entire epistemological approach, from science and mathematics, to logic and the Ideas—from the ground the up. (shrink)

A History of Scottish Philosophy is a series of collaborative studies by expert authors, each volume being devoted to a specific period. Together they provide a comprehensive account of the Scottish philosophical tradition, from the centuries that laid the foundation of the remarkable burst of intellectual fertility known as the Scottish Enlightenment, through the Victorian age and beyond, when it continued to exercise powerful intellectual influence at home and abroad. The books aim to be historically informative, while at the same (...) time serving to renew philosophical interest in the problems with which the Scottish philosophers grappled and in the solutions they proposed. -/- This is a companion volume to Scottish Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century, Volume I. Where Volume I covered Scottish Enlightenment contributions to morals, politics, art, and religion, this second volume covers philosophical method, metaphysics, and the philosophy of mind. It includes a comprehensive account of the teaching of philosophy in Scottish universities in the eighteenth century. Particular attention is given to Scottish achievements in the science of the mind in chapters on perception, the intellectual powers, the active powers, habit and the association of ideas, and language. (shrink)

I am going to argue for a robust realism about magnitudes, as irreducible elements in our ontology. This realistic attitude, I will argue, gives a better metaphysics than the alternatives. It suggests some new options in the philosophy of science. It also provides the materials for a better account of the mind’s relation to the world, in particular its perceptual relations.

How does the philosophical debate between naive realism and intentionalism relate to the psychological debate between ecological theories and constructivist theories? The participants in each debate take themselves to be doing something distinctive, but I show that characterizing the distinction is difficult: the theories in both debates use inference to the best explanation to draw contingent conclusions about the constitutive nature of perception. I argue that both debates concern the metaphysics of perception, and that philosophers of (...) class='Hi'>perception are wrong to think that constructivist and ecological theories are engaged in a distinct and non-metaphysical task. (shrink)

This is a translation of the chapter on perception by Kumarilabhatta's magnum opus, the Slokavarttika , which is one of the central texts of the Hindu response to the criticism of the logical-epistemological school of Buddhist thought. It is crucial for understanding the debates between Hindus and Buddhists about metaphysical, epistemological and linguistic questions during the classical period. In an extensive commentary, the author explains the course of the argument from verse to verse and alludes to other theories (...) of classical Indian philosophy and numerous other technical matters. Notes to the translation and commentary go further into the historical and philosophical background of Kumarila's ideas. The book provides an introduction to the history and the development of Indian epistemology, a synopsis of Kumarila's work and an analysis of its argument. It is a valuable contribution to the field of Indian philosophical studies. (shrink)

The chapter begins with a sketch of the empirical, theoretical, and philosophical background to nineteenth-century theories of perception, focusing on visual perception. It then considers German sensory physiology and psychology in the nineteenth century and its reception. This section gives special attention to: assumptions about nerve–sensation relations; spatial perception; the question of whether there is a two-dimensional representation in visual experience; psychophysics; size constancy; and theories of colour perception. The chapter then offers a brief (...) look at the interaction between perceptual theory and philosophical issues in epistemology and the metaphysics of mind in Britain and America, focusing on: the notion of a muscle sense; the problem of the external world; and forms of perceptual realism. It ends with an overview of psychological theories of perception in the early twentieth century and the Gestalt reaction, culminating with J. J. Gibson. (shrink)

This dissertation examines the theory of perceptual cognition laid out by the 7th century Buddhist scholar, Dharmakīrti, in his magnum opus, the Pramāṇavārttika. Like most theories of perception, both ancient and modern, the sensory cognition of ordinary objects is a topic of primary concern. Unlike other theorists, however, Dharmakīrti advances a technical definition of “perception” as a cognition which is both nonconceptual and non-erroneous. Dharmakīrti’s definition of perception is thereby deliberately inclusive of three additional types of “perceptual” (...) cognition, in addition to veridical sensory awareness: the nonconceptual mental apprehension of an immediately-preceding cognition (“mental perception”), the vivid appearance of soteriologically efficacious objects of contemplative practice (“yogic perception”), and the sheer unmediated presence of the contents of cognition—whatever these might be—to the cognizing mind (“reflexive awareness”). Through the logical examination of what it means to be aware of an object, Dharmakīrti demonstrates that the awareness of an object is just the awareness of a phenomenal form or cognitive image produced by that object. Pursuing this analysis further, however, Dharmakīrti argues that the very notion of an object of cognition that exists “externally” or outside the mind is incoherent. Additionally, Dharmakīrti maintains that the phenomenological structure of subject and object—that is, the “first-personal” sense of one’s own cognitions as pertaining to oneself (“for-me-ness”), together with the inseparably concomitant sense that the objects of cognition exist “out there” in an extramental world—is strictly a form of cognitive error. Therefore, because ordinary sensory cognition is inherently structured by this subject-object duality, ordinary sensory cognition must in the final analysis be understood as erroneous. According to Dharmakīrti, in other words, ultimately only the nondual “luminosity” of reflexive awareness is genuinely perceptual, because only reflexive awareness is undistorted by nature. In this way, Dharmakīrti’s epistemology provides a theoretical foundation for the advanced nondual contemplative practices of Indian and Tibetan Buddhism, particularly Mahāmudrā and rDzogs chen. (shrink)

Philosophers in the Western tradition have both theorized about imagination and used imagination in their theorizing about other matters. In this chapter, I first provide a brief overview of philosophical theorizing about imagination with a special focus on its relation to other mental states such as belief and perception. I then turn to a discussion of the methodological role that imagination has played in philosophy. I here focus on the imaginability principle, i.e., the claim that the imaginability of (...) a given scenario entails that such a scenario is in some sense possible. Relying on this kind of principle, philosophers have used imagination to justify theories in domains such as philosophy of mind, metaphysics and ethics. (shrink)

Introduction to the Two Volumes xi PART ONE: G. E. MOORE ON ETHICS, EPISTEMOLOGY, AND PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS 1 CHAPTER 1 Common Sense and Philosophical Analysis 3 CHAPTER 2 Moore on Skepticism, Perception, and Knowledge 12 CHAPTER 3 Moore on Goodness and the Foundations of Ethics 34 CHAPTER 4 The Legacies and Lost Opportunities of Moore’s Ethics 71 Suggested Further Reading 89 PART TWO: BERTRAND RUSSELL ON LOGICAL AND LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS 91 CHAPTER 5 Logical Form, (...) Grammatical Form, and the Theory of Descriptions 93 CHAPTER 6 Logic and Mathematics: The Logicist Reduction 132 CHAPTER 7 Logical Constructions and the External World 165 CHAPTER 8 Russell’s Logical Atomism 182 Suggested Further Reading 194 PART THREE: LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN’S TRACTATUS 195 CHAPTER 9 The Metaphysics of the Tractatus 197 CHAPTER 10 Meaning, Truth, and Logic in the Tractatus 214 CHAPTER 11 The Tractarian Test of Intelligibility and Its Consequences 234 Suggested Further Reading 254 PART FOUR: LOGICAL POSITIVISM, EMOTIVISM, AND ETHICS 255 CHAPTER 12 The Logical Positivists on Necessity and Apriori Knowledge 257 CHAPTER 13 The Rise and Fall of the Empiricist Criterion of Meaning 271 CHAPTER 14 Emotivism and Its Critics 300 CHAPTER 15 Normative Ethics in the Era of Emotivism: The Anticonsequentialism of Sir David Ross 320 Suggested Further Reading 346 PART FIVE: THE POST-POSITIVIST PERSPECTIVE OF THE EARLY W. V. QUINE 349 CHAPTER 16 The Analytic and the Synthetic, the Necessary and the Possible, the Apriori and the Aposteriori 351 CHAPTER 17 Meaning and Holistic Verificationism 378 Suggested Further Reading 406 Index 409. (shrink)

Although the “Transcendental Aesthetic” is the briefest part of the first Critique, it has garnered a lion's share of discussion. This fact reflects the important implications that Kant drew from his arguments there. He used the arguments concerning space and time to display examples of synthetic a priori cognition, to secure his division between intuitions and concepts, and to support transcendental idealism. Earlier, in the years around 1770, Kant's investigations into space and time had facilitated his turn toward “critical” philosophy. (...) Prior to that time, Kant's main interests in space and time pertained to physics and metaphysics. As he entered the critical period, he delved into the cognitive basis of our experience of space (and time), and drew his conclusions about their ideality. Kant's doctrines of space and time provoked extensive response in his own time and throughout the nineteenth century. These responses variously concerned the metaphysics, physics, epistemology, psychology, and geometry of space. Throughout the nineteenth century, philosophers, physiologists, and psychologists sought to extend or to refute Kant's theories of space. By the last decades of the nineteenth century, many had rightly concluded that the existence of non-Euclidean geometry as a candidate description of physical space refuted Kant's full doctrine of space - though some have hoped that his position might be saved by restricting it to “visual space.”. (shrink)

This paper aims to challenge the idea claimed by Putnam in his Dewey Lectures that internal realism presupposed sense data theory so that it would have been unable to account for the fundamental intuition of common sense realism that perception gives us cognitive access to reality. Rather, I argue that Putnam’s writings from the period of internal realism indicate that it (internal realism) already presupposed a form of direct realism of the kind he puts forth in the Dewey lectures. (...) I support my thesis with a demonstration of the implication of direct realism in the refutation of the brain-in-a-vat hypothesis that occurs in the first chapter of Reason, Truth and History, as well as with various passages from the philosopher’s writings of the time when he defended internal realism. I also argue, contrary to what the philosopher seems to assert in his Dewey Lectures, that his model-theoretic argument against metaphysical realism does not involve sense data theory. After noting the very strong resemblance between the theses of his common sense realism of the 1990s and those of his internal realism of the 1980s, I hypothesize that Putnam pretended to renounce internal realism in order to allow himself to rephrase his original position so as to avoid being misinterpreted as a form of idealism or fact constructivism, as was the case with his initial statement. (shrink)

In an effort to reassess the status of Phenomenology of Perception and its relation to The Visible and the Invisible, this essay argues that Merleau-Ponty's engagement with Husserl's text and his discussion of the “field of presence” in La temporalité are intended to think through the field in which time makes its appearance as one of passage. Time does not show itself as presence or in the present but manifests itself as Ablauf, as lapse or flow, an écoulement that (...) is simultaneously an explosion, an éclatement. Merleau-Ponty's account of temporality in these pages is thus legible as recovering the primordial experience of time as a self-differentiating déhiscence in its dual power of articulation and erosion. Time is thus simultaneously the vehicle of the world's appearance and of its “disarticulation”, the passage of a rhythm of affirmation and disintegration. Merleau-Ponty's account of temporality in Phenomenology of Perception is oblique, somewhat fragmentary and circuitous.11 References to Merleau-Ponty's works cite the French followed by the English translation. I will use the abbreviation PhP for Phenomenology of Perception and VI for The Visible and the Invisible. Other texts by Merleau-Ponty will be referenced by the title. References to Husserl and Heidegger use the German followed by the translation. I will use the abbreviations ZB for the Zeitbewußtsein lectures; FT for Formale und transzendentale Logik; EU for Erfahrung und Urteil; and SZ for Sein und Zeit. View all notes While of course this phenomenon comes under close scrutiny in La temporalité, a brief inspection of this text as a whole finds it to be virtually everywhere.22 The theme of temporality is introduced as early as the Preface to Part I, “Experience and Objective Thought” and appears again in almost every subsequent chapter: the first chapter of Part I ; in his discussion on number blindness and Goldstein's patient known as Schneider in La spatialité du corps et la motricité ; in the sexuality chapter ; in the discussion of memory in La corps comme expression et la parole ; in Le sentir ; in the discussion of depth in L'espace ; in La chose et le monde naturel ; in Autrui et le monde humain and in Le cogito. Rather than providing the perhaps much called for synopsis of these scattered accounts of time or trying to locate a unified account in Phenomenology of Perception through such a synopsis, this essay will focus only on La temporalité, particularly the discussion of Husserl's diagram from the Zeitbewußtsein and the “champ de présence”. View all notes It is this apparent ubiquity that will motivate scholars such as Renaud Barbaras to claim that “… the entire structure of Phenomenology of Perception rests on a chapter devoted to temporality”.33 Barbaras The Being of the Phenomenon, 218. View all notes In spite of this ubiquity and apparent centrality, however, the treatment of temporality seems to neglect a systematic and thoroughgoing approach, and whether this work manages to address this theme with a sufficient degree of rigor remains open to debate. Furthermore, beyond the scattered and fragmented appearance of temporality in the text, the chapter devoted to its exploration contains numerous, well-recognized problems.44 Merleau-Ponty's misinterpretation of Bergson in this chapter has received much warranted attention. Alia Al-Saji, for example, has criticized Merleau-Ponty's account of temporality in this chapter of Phenomenology of Perception for this misreading as well as its perhaps too uncritical infatuation with Husserl and his emphasis on presence. See Lawlor Thinking Through French Philosophy, Al-Saji “The Temporality of Life” and “A Past Which Has Never Been Present” and Barbaras “The Turn of Experience”. View all notes Among these difficulties, Merleau-Ponty's engagement with Husserl's lectures on time-consciousness, the Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins,55 The 1928 publication of the Zeitbewußtsein, edited by Heidegger, is what appears in the bibliography of Phenomenology of Perception. This version, from the Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologishe Forschung, as Brough notes, appears as “Part A” of Husserliana X. The notes that constitute this version of the text, furthermore, as Heidegger mentions in his preface to the Jahrbuch version and which Brough repeats were heavily edited by Husserl's assistant at the time, Edith Stein. Merleau-Ponty's references to the Zeitbewußtsein cut across various moments of the text and do not focus on one section in particular, and in fact, he actually references section 11, “Urimpression und retentionale Modifikation”/“Primal impression and retentional modification” in his discussion of the field of presence. As Al-Saji has noted, the extent to which Merleau-Ponty's account of time in La temporalité centres the account of time on “the living present” can be shown to be at play behind the misreading of Bergson. While I do not wish to dispute the specifics of her compelling reading, it is nonetheless worth noting that Al-Saji's reading of the Zeitbewußtsein only focuses on Appendix V, “Gleichzeitigkeit von Wahrnehmung und Wahrgenommenem”/“Simultaneity of Perception and the Perceived”. View all notes looms large, as it seems that his discussion of what he designates as le champ de présence or “field of presence” commits him to the ontological primacy of the present in his account of time. As a result, this earlier work appears to confine itself to a metaphysics organized around the privilege and authority of the present in establishing the structure of time.66 Leonard Lawlor has convincingly argued against this interpretation. Following the famous remark at the end of Le Sentir about “a past which has never been present”, Lawlor argues that precisely because Merleau-Ponty's critique of Bergson is a straw man – that is, because his critique of Bergson is based on a misreading – a closer inspection of Le Sentir and La temporalité shows Merleau-Ponty to be committed to the ontological primacy of an “originary” past. See Lawlor Thinking Through French Philosophy, 89. Marratto, following Lawlor, takes up the charge of a metaphysics of presence in Phenomenology of Perception in dialogue with Derrida. Marratto argues that Derrida's reading selectively overlooks “the very imporant dimensions of difference, discontinuity, and delay and non-self-presence in Merleau-Ponty's descriptions”, located particularly in the latter's theory of subjectivity. I agree with Marratto's assessment, and my aim here is to deepen it by turning in more detail to La temporalité. View all notes This apparent commitment to the ontological primacy of the present, for some readers, has also functioned as an index for tracking the revision of Phenomenology of Perception that is said to figure in The Visible and the Invisible, where a metaphysics of the present is replaced with a commitment to the primacy of an original past, signalling a significant break in the development of Merleau-Ponty's thought.77 This has bearing on the debate mentioned above as the question of temporality and Merleau-Ponty's evolving relationship with Bergson are also cited as part of the index for tracking the differences between Phenomenology of Perception and The Visible and the Invisible. What we see, according to this reading, is Merleau-Ponty move away from a more strictly phenomenological orientation of Phenomenology of Perception, an orientation that is said to adversely mediate his early, critical stance with respect to Bergson, toward a progressively less Husserlian and more Bergsonian stance in The Visible and the Invisible. While he does not specifically address Merleau-Ponty's engagement with Bergson, Marratto's reading also places a special emphasis on the significance of the past, specifically Merleau-Ponty's reference to a “past which has never been present”. It is also not my intention to enter into the question of Merleau-Ponty's relationship with Bergson. Rather, I will restrict my remarks specifically to Merleau-Ponty's engagement with Husserl and the Zeitbewußtsein in La temporalité in order to show that there are grounds for at least questioning one of the premises of the interpretation mentioned above, namely that Phenomenology of Perception is unequivocally legible as committed to the ontological primacy of the present. As will become clear later in the essay, I also dispute interpretations that would place the emphasis on the ontological primacy of an original past. For my own views on the significance of a “past which has never been present”, see Whitmoyer “The Primary Silence of the Past”. View all notes In considering the manner in which the Zeitbewußtsein figures in La temporalité and Merleau-Ponty's discussion of the field of presence, it will do to think about the parameters in which his engagement with Husserl is staged more generally. It seems that Merleau-Ponty never considered his task in terms of the perhaps false alternative of fidelity and heresy, because “any commemoration is also a betrayal”, and because the task of the interpreter is, as he famously notes, thinking through that “unthought-of element … which is wholly his [Husserl's] and yet opens out on something else”.88 Merleau-Ponty, Signes, 203/160. This methodological dictum is developed in more detail in the notes to the course offered on Husserl's Origin of Geometry in 1959–1960. “We are saying not that Husserl was that, but that Husserl was not only what they say, was also another, bearer of an unthought”. View all notes Following Merleau-Ponty's own indications, we could suggest that Husserl's text, rather than a source of orthodoxy, functions as a point of orientation through which Merleau-Ponty marks out his own theory of temporality.99 I will not, therefore, address the question of the “accuracy” of his interpretation of Husserl because, according to Merleau-Ponty himself, this question presupposes that the author, in this case Husserl, has a privileged access to his thought, as if there is some kernel or essence of what a philosopher thought that interpreters can either get right or wrong. As the remarks in “The Philosopher and His Shadow” make clear, interpretation can never really avail itself of this presupposition and in this manner the question of accuracy is precisely the wrong question. View all notes This essay argues that his discussion of the Zeitbewußtsein in Phenomenology of Perception does not offer an account of time that “centers around the living present”, as some have argued,1010 Al-Saji “A Past Which Has Never Been Present”, 42–44. View all notes but that the discussion of the field of presence and what follows are rather intended to account for the field of temporal phenomenalization – not as a presence – but as écoulement, passage and flux. Time, therefore, does not appear in the present or as presence, but manifests itself as a flow and movement that is simultaneously an éclatement, an eruption, and a self-differentiating “dehiscence”.1111 A favorite word of Merleau-Ponty, borrowed from botany, where it designates the splitting open of a seed-pod or flower as well as medicine, where it refers to the splitting open of a healed or partially healed wound. The idea here is that, in its flow and passage, time splits open in a process of differentiation – which is simultaneously a process of degeneration, decay, and what Merleau-Ponty will term in The Visible and the Invisible, “disarticulation”. View all notes Time's passage is not determined, organized and oriented in advance in accordance with a transcendental synthesis that would give it shape and form, privileging one temporal dimension over another, so much as it is understood in terms of a splitting open, or to use another favoured locution of Merleau-Ponty, a “deflagration”.1212 In Eye and Mind, Merleau-Ponty speaks of the “deflagration of being”. Metaphors of explosiveness and dissonance populate his attempt to think being otherwise than as structure, form, and stability. Here I will focus particularly on écoulement, flux and éclatement, eruption, because these are the terms he uses in his discussion of time in La temporalité. See Merleau-Ponty L’Œil et l'esprit, 64/369. View all notes To this extent, Merleau-Ponty's account of temporality in Phenomenology of Perception cannot be said to orient itself in terms of the ontological primacy of any one temporal dimension – past, present, or future – but is more accurately understood as an attempt to recover the primordial experience of time as the simultaneity of écoulement and éclatement – an account that thinks time in its dual power of phenomenalization and erosion, the “pulse [pulsation] of my existence, its systole and diastole”.1313 Merleau-Ponty PhP, 337/332. View all notes Time is the vehicle of the world's appearance, and at the same time of its “disarticulation” [désarticulation],1414 This is a term Merleau-Ponty uses in The Visible and the Invisible in a well-known working note entitled “ Transcendence – forgetting – time”. See Merleau-Ponty VI, 247/197. View all notes the vehicle through which “becoming” – rather than being – shows itself. This process of phenomenalization, precisely because it is temporal, never achieves the density of fully realized being – the sense of this becoming is never fully articulate – but is perpetually subject to a temporal erasure that necessitates its repetition and reiteration. Time, in other words, is the principle of the world's eloquence – it is that thanks to which things have and make sense and simultaneously the principle of the world's murmuring stutter, the principle through which the sense of things remains incomplete and even erodes, decays, and degenerates. To begin, I will turn to Merleau-Ponty's reading of Husserl's diagram from the Zeitbewußtsein, which opens his attempt to “arrive at authentic time”.1515 Merleau-Ponty PhP, 477/483. View all notes Rather than simply rehearsing Husserl's discussion of primal impression, retention and protention, Merleau-Ponty's analysis of the diagram provides an opportunity for raising two problems: the problem of time's representability and the problem of its synthesis. Rather than through an “act intentionality” carried out by a transcendental subjectivity, time appears in accordance with an “operative intentionality” always already under way. Turning to the section of La temporalité aptly entitled “Passive Synthesis”, we see that Merleau-Ponty's analysis of the diagram leads him to the paradox of passive synthesis and what he calls, following Husserl, “transition synthesis”. Time does not show itself punctually – time appears neither as presence nor in the present – but only in the dual movement of its flux, its écoulement, and its éclatement, its explosive, self-differentiating unfurling. These reflections, finally, bring Merleau-Ponty into dialogue with Heidegger on what the latter called the Zusammenhang des Lebens. The “unity of a life”, accordingly, is not a question of any “resolution”, but is a function of our immersion in this temporal dehiscence. The important lesson to be learned from Merleau-Ponty's engagement with Husserl's Zeitbewußtsein is not something about the ontological primacy of one temporal dimension over another but what Merleau-Ponty famously calls in The Visible and the Invisible the “passivity of our activity”1616 Merleau-Ponty VI, 270/221. View all notes and our immersion in time's power of disarticulation. (shrink)

Nosso objetivo é destacar algumas questões concernentes ao problema da matéria e do movimento na filosofia de Bergson. Questões presentes em seu segundo livro, Matéria e memória, as quais indicam uma nova orientação de sua filosofia: a passagem da psicologia à metafísica; mais precisamente, a introdução do tema do movimento e da duração "fora de nós". O primeiro capítulo do livro, ao caracterizar o universo material como um conjunto de imagens, desempenha um papel fundamental nessa passagem, a qual efetivamente se (...) dá no quarto capítulo, momento em que elabora uma metafísica da matéria. Para além desse contexto, é na direção de seu terceiro livro, A evolução criadora, que essa metafísica da matéria consequentemente aponta. Our aim is to highlight some issues concerning the problem of matter and movement in the philosophy of Bergson. Issues presented in his second book, Matter and Memory, which indicate a new direction of his philosophy: the transition from psychology to metaphysics, more precisely, introducing the theme of movement and duration "outside of us." The first chapter of the book, in describing the material universe as a set of images plays a key role in this passage, which effectively occurs in the fourth chapter, at which time elaborates metaphysics of matter. Beyond this context, it is in the direction of his third book, Creative Evolution, that the metaphysics of matter will consequently point. (shrink)

This chapter explores perspectivism in the American Pragmatist tradition. On the one hand, the thematization of perspectivism in contemporary epistemology and philosophy of science can benefit from resources in the American Pragmatist philosophical tradition. On the other hand, the Pragmatists have interesting and innovative, pluralistic views that can be illuminated through the lens of perspectivism. I pursue this inquiry primarily through examining relevant sources from the Pragmatist tradition. I will illustrate productive engagements between pragmatism and perspectivism in three areas: (...) in the pragmatists’ fallibilistic theories of inquiry and truth, in their pluralistic metaphysics, and in their views on cultural pluralism. While there are some potential sticking points between pragmatism and perspectivism, particularly around the visual metaphor of perspective, these philosophical approaches nonetheless have much to learn from each other. Perspectivism is in danger of falling between the horns of pernicious relativism and a platitudinous view of the limits of human perception and cognition. The pragmatists accounts of truth and reality open the possibility of a more thoroughgoing perspectivism. I will follow this thread through Charles S. Peirce’s, William James’, and John Dewey’s theories of inquiry and truth, Peirce’s evolutionary metaphysics, James’ radical pluralism, Dewey’s cultural naturalism, Richard Rorty’s anti-essentialism, Jane Addams’ standpoint epistemology, W.E.B. Du Bois’ theory of race consciousness, Horace Kallen’s and Alain LeRoy Locke’s cultural pluralism, and Mary Parker Follett’s account of pluralistic integration. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Leaky Boat Holding Wine: A Study of the Word-Meaning Debate in Wei-Jin Six Dynasties Period Thought by Jing YuanRun Gu (bio)Lou Chuan Zai Jiu: Yanyi zhi Bian yu Wei-Jin Liu Chao Sixiang Xueshu Yangjiu 漏船载酒: 言意之辨与魏晋六朝思想学术研究 (A Leaky Boat Holding Wine: A Study of the Word-Meaning Debate in Wei-Jin Six Dynasties Period Thought). By Jing Yuan 袁晶. Shanghai: Shanghai People's Press, 2022. Pp. 247. Paperback RMB23.93, isbn (...) 978-7-208-17567-9.In A Leaky Boat Holding Wine: A Study of the Word-Meaning Debate in Wei-Jin Six Dynasties Period Thought (hereafter A Leaky Boat Holding Wine), Jing Yuan offers a careful review and critical evaluation of one of the major philosophical topics in the Wei-Jin period, namely, the word-meaning (Yanyi 言意) debate. In several previous publications, Yuan has addressed the word-meaning controversy from different angles and in various classics, including Prajnaparamita and The Analects.The word-meaning debate, as Yuan explains, can be interpreted as a conflict between cognition and expression, and reveals a series of contradictions and conflicts in ontology, epistemology, and philosophy of life among scholars in the Wei-Jin period. The debate refers to the controversy on whether words can fully express meaning or not. It departs from the relationships between word and meaning to critically evaluate their functions and limitations, and mainly consists of two ways of thinking: "distinguishing names, analyzing principles" (bian ming xi li 辯名析理) and "getting the meaning, forgetting the words" (de yi wang yan 得意忘言). Although this debate had already developed in China for quite some time, it was only prevalent as a common philosophical theme in the Wei-Jin period, a time characterized by social disorder and endless war. The metaphor in the book title, "a leaky boat holding wine," is from one of Lu Xun's (1881) poems, illustrating that although people use words as a tool to express meaning, it is impossible for words to convey all meaning. Yuan uses the metaphor to refer to the capacity of a word to carry meaning, and indicates that human thought and expression are inseparable from words, but cannot be entirely restricted to them.The book is organized in chronological order, and readers can easily grasp how the word-meaning debate was developed and reshaped in different periods, responding to various social-political contexts. Chapter 1 starts with the origin of the debate in the early Qin period. The author provides a solid examination of relevant theories and high-quality secondary literature. She clearly demonstrates that both early Daoist and Confucian thinkers were involved in the debate, and [End Page 1] that it aimed to describe a core ontology--or a search for the principles of the cosmos--and understand various other aspects of the world, including natural cycles and social ethics. Confucius advocated a metaphorical grasp of the Dao, transforming epistemology into practical philosophy. He held a critical attitude toward the relationship of word and meaning, arguing that words could express meaning because people could use them to influence the state and society. Confucius also believed that Dao, as an imaginative and contextual concept, could not be expressed through words.In contrast, Zhuangzi--"the most significant source of inspiration for Neo-Daoism (Metaphysics) in the Wei-Jin period" (p. 70)--focuses on the limitations of the function of words to convey meaning, highlighting the ineffable nature of Dao. Zhuangzi's concept of Dao, according to Yuan, is always beyond the reach of our senses and can only be attained through an intuitive grasp of reality: through the ability to reach an epiphany and perceive through the mind, even when not observing through physical means. It is only with an intuitive way of thinking that one can identify the ultimate noumenon and grasp the idea of Dao when words cannot contain it. In Zhuangzi's epistemology, Dao is grasped using a method of knowing that transcends ordinary sense perception, knowledge or rationality, and provides a non-logical intuition and an experience of a practical nature that transcends knowing.On this basis, the author brings together ancient and current research on the word-meaning debate, to critically assess the impact of Zhuangzi... (shrink)

This paper argues that the Islamic metaphysical vision finds its Western philosophical counterpart in Anna-Teresa Tymienecka's Phenomenology of Life. Comparative analysis of the main categories and strategies of knowledge in Islamic metaphysics and the Phenomenology of Life demonstrates obvious similarities, but also significant distinctions whereby the systems can be viewed as complementary. Tymieniecka’s philosophy begins with epoché on preceding philosophical knowledge, while Islamic philosophy begins with revelation. Tymieniecka uses presuppositionless phenomenological direct intuition combined with reflective analysis, while Sufi (...) class='Hi'>metaphysics combines logic, intuitio,n and reliance on the experience attained in states of mystical perception. Unification of Reality and realization of truth in the Phenomenology of Life is attained via phenomenological intuition of life in all forms of experience, and in Islam, via certainty attained in religious experiences of unveiling. Due to its refocusing on the dynamic moments of the ontopoiesis of life, Tymieniecka’s ontology serves as a possible solution to the problems incurred by the more static metaphysical vision of Reality in Sufism. (shrink)

This chapter discusses Peter John Olivi’s conception of the role of dispositions in sensory cognition from metaphysical and psychological perspectives. It shows that Olivi makes a distinction between two general types of disposition. Some of them account for the ease, or difficulty, with which different persons use their cognitive powers, while others explain why people react differently to things that they perceive or think. This distinction is then applied to Olivi’s analysis of three different psychological operations, where the notion (...) of disposition figures prominently; estimative perception, perceptual clarity, and the perception of pain and pleasure. The chapter argues that Olivi uses cognitive dispositions in an interesting way to explain individual differences between persons, and that they reveal the dynamic nature of his conception of human psychology. (shrink)

This chapter discusses Peter John Olivi’s conception of the role of dispositions in sensory cognition from metaphysical and psychological perspectives. It shows that Olivi makes a distinction between two general types of disposition. Some of them account for the ease, or difficulty, with which different persons use their cognitive powers, while others explain why people react differently to things that they perceive or think. This distinction is then applied to Olivi’s analysis of three different psychological operations, where the notion (...) of disposition figures prominently; estimative perception, perceptual clarity, and the perception of pain and pleasure. The chapter argues that Olivi uses cognitive dispositions in an interesting way to explain individual differences between persons, and that they reveal the dynamic nature of his conception of human psychology. (shrink)

Among those who pay homage to Parmenides as a source of unquenchable inspiration for Western thought, we now revisit the Poem Of Nature as the birthplace of the principle of causality through the elimination of non-being at the origin of being. Indeed in Parmenides’ Poem, a negative conviction can be found—the refusal that the non-being is at the origin of the being—which leads most philosophers to the affirmative conviction that something is at the origin of the being. The two convictions (...) are two rational beliefs which have stimulated ancient Greek philosophy, and have continuously represented a structuring axis in the history of Western thought. With Aristotle, that affirmative conviction was converted into a principle of causality, that is, into a principle which requires a causal explanation for the intelligibility of reality. In Latin Middle Ages, we find a singular figure who promotes the synthesis of the two fundamental beliefs, the negative conviction, explicit in Parmenides, and the affirmative conviction, explicit in Aristotle: It is Saint Anselm. In an initial chapter of his first work, the Monologion, Anselm declares that “nothing is by nothing”, and that consequently “all that is, is not but by something”. All of Anselm’s metaphysics is an analysis and a development of this affirmative rational belief. Therefore, we claim Parmenides’ paternity of Saint Anselm’s metaphysics, of whom one may say he was the medieval Parmenides. (shrink)

In recent decades, and with the rise of the biological sciences, the color literature especially has taken seriously evidence from ethology and comparative psychology. However, there has been significantly less discussion of comparative cases in other areas of philosophy of perception. This essay aims to bring insights from animal studies into dialogue with more traditional ways of thinking about the perception of size. It argues that an indexing approach to perceptual representation, pioneered by Prettyman (Perceptual content is indexed (...) to attention. Synthese, 194(10), 4039–4054, 2017) in response to evidence of attentional effects in perception, cannot fully address the challenge. (shrink)

An overview of the epistemology of perception, covering the nature of justification, immediate justification, the relationship between the metaphysics of perceptual experience and its rational role, the rational role of attention, and cognitive penetrability. The published version will contain a smaller bibliography, due to space constraints in the volume.

The aim of this dissertation is to defend the view that vision is a noninferential way of acquiring knowledge about what takes place in one's immediate vicinity. This direct approach to vision is opposed to the widely-held Cartesian idea that in perception items of consciousness function as epistemic intermediaries. ;In Chapter One I argue that the content of experience is the same as the content of the judgments we would make on the basis of experience, were we to (...) take experience at face value. The representational content of experience, like that of judgment, is fully conceptual. In Chapter Two I examine and criticize the view that experience has, in addition to representational content, irreducibly subjective, nonconceptual, phenomenal content. ;The upshot of these discussions is that experience is an epistemic notion. To have an experience is not just passively to have sensations; it requires the exercise of understanding. The relation between experience and reality is not causal, but normative: to have an experience is to take things to be some way or other, and how things are gives us reasons for taking them to be that way. In Chapter Three I argue that the Causal Theory of Perception misdescribes the place of causation in an account of perception and that it relies on an unsatisfactory conception of experience. In this connection I evaluate the so-called Argument from Illusion. ;In the remainder of the dissertation I take up a different set of issues. First, I defend the reality of appearances by arguing that how something looks--in particular, what color it is--is a fully mind-independent, higher-order property of the thing. Second, I consider the view that contemporary cognitive theories of vision, which explain vision in terms of inference, computation and construction, pose a threat to direct realism. Against this I argue that computational theories provide abstract characterizations of subpersonal processes which causally enable vision. In particular, they describe these blind causal processes as if they involved inference and construction. But the subpersonal processes subserving vision, while causally important, are themselves epistemically irrelevant. (shrink)

The present paper deals thus with some fundamental agreements and disagreements between Peirce and James, on crucial issues such as perception and consciousness. When Peirce first read the Principles, he was sketching his theory of the categories, testing its applications in many fields of knowledge, and many investigations were launched, concerning indexicals, diagrams, growth and development. James's utterances led Peirce to make his own views clearer on a wide range of topics that go to the heart of the foundations (...) of psychology and that involve the relationship between perception and logic, between consciousness and the categories, between abstraction and the 'stream of thought'. The idea is to show that Peirce detected important discoveries and insights in the Principles, but felt that James could not make proper use of them because of logical confusions, and also because of his "clandestine" metaphysics. The point in this essay is thus not to look for remains of psychologism in Peirce's writings,13 but to look at Peirce's comments about James's psychology in an attempt to identify where and why Peirce amended James's views. Since the project to provide some insight on Peirce's extensive reading ofJames's Principles of Psycho/.ogy would deserve a full volume, I shall focus here on three occasions where Peirce explicidy commented on Jarnes's Principles. In the first section, I shall consider bis assessment of James's chapter on space, which was published as a series of articles in 1887, in Mind. I shall then turn to the 1891 review of the Principles in The Nation for important complements on perception as inference. In the third section, I shall deal with Peirce's manuscript "Questions on James's Principles"(Rl099). These "Questions" reveal a deep interest in psychological problems and suggest different ways along which Peirce's new advances in the field of the categories, of continuity, and abstraction could provide a proper basis for the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

Plato's Tim. 90b1-c6 describes a pathway to the soul's salvation via the study of the heavens. This paper poses three questions about this theme in Platonism: 1. The epistemological question: How is the paradigmatic function of the visible heavenly bodies to be reconciled with various Platonic misgivings about the faculty of perception? 2. The metaphysical question: How can »assimilation« to the motions of bodies in the realm of Becoming provide for the salvation of souls when souls are »higher«- a (...) mid-point between Being and Becoming? 3. The psychological question: What can it mean for an incorporeal soul to utilise the motions of a body for an ethical and cognitive paradigm? And provides an account of how Proclus and some of his fellow Neoplatonists answered these questions. (shrink)

The author looks to "deep structures" or "submerged" models to give insight into Malebranche's thought. He finds two such models: the traditional model of "substance," according to which things are organized in a hierarchy of genera and species, and the model of "number" which emerged in the seventeenth century, and in accordance with which relations are manipulated to establish further relations. The two archetypal concepts, the one old, the other new, create a tension in many areas of thought. This tension (...) is examined first as it occurs in Descartes. With Malebranche the polarity becomes even more evident. The concept of number is at the base primarily of his epistemology and theory of science, that of substance primarily in his metaphysics and theology. The two spheres are however mutually affecting. Arithmetic and algebra provide Malebranche with "the true logic that serves to discover truth and produce in the mind all the extension of which it is capable." Algebra is "the most fruitful and certain of all sciences... with it the mind is capable of knowing all that can be known with certitude and evidence." Accordingly truths will be of the sort found in the relations typified in algebra as opposed to the subject-predicate relation appropriate to an ontology of substances generically conceived. Malebranche's "ideas," taken ontologically, are viewed by him as substantive entities. Epistemologically, however, they have the nature of relations of magnitude. "The order of truths as relations between ideas was equally," says Hobart, "an order of ideas that were themselves relations--in the same way that the relations between numbers were in effect relations between relations 'compounded to infinity'." The traditional concept of substance to which Hobart refers is primarily Platonic, for he says that in accordance with it, "The world of forms... is the truest and hence the most real, contrasting with the perceptible world in which things are not so perfect. This conception of reality enabled and indeed required the gradations of perfection from the perceptible and imperfect to the real and perfect, those infinite qualitative gradations that comprised the existence and plenitude of the great chain of being." Malebranche's attitude to this is seen by the author to be ambiguous. On the one hand, under the influence of the mathematical and relational way of conceiving truth, a true relation is both real and existent, and a false one neither real nor existent. Hence instead of thinking of reality in terms of gradations of qualities, it is taken simply as the existent, and therefore as merely disjunctive with the non-existent. Nothing can be predicated of the non-existent. At the same time Malebranche wants to retain the gradations of perfection. Thus he says, "But one can distinguish in God two kinds of truths or relations: relations of magnitude and relations of perfection," the latter being assigned to the realm of the practical and moral. The final chapter entitled "The Conflict between 'Substance' and 'Number'" is concerned with how this conflict affected Malebranche's understanding of the relation between science and religion. The conflict is described as occurring within the concepts of infinity, necessity and being in their relation to the divine nature. Finally there is the question of the relation of reason and faith, and here Hobart finds that a dual sense of faith and a dual sense of reason compete with one another in Malebranche's thought. This book is a subtle and novel treatment of the great Oratorian.--Robert McRae, University of Toronto. (shrink)

What sort of thing is the mind? And how can such a thing at the same time - belong to the natural world, - represent the world, - give rise to our subjective experience, - and ground human knowledge? Content, Consciousness and Perception is an edited collection, comprising eleven new contributions to the philosophy of mind, written by some of the most promising young philosophers in the UK and Ireland. The book is arranged into three parts. Part I, Concepts (...) and Mental Content, which begins with an attack by Hans-Johann Glock on the representational theory of mind, addresses the nature of mental representation. Part II, Consciousness and the Metaphysics of Mind, concerns the prospects for a naturalistic metaphysics of the conscious mind. Finally, Part III, entitled Perception, pursues the project of giving a satisfactory philosophical account of perceptual experience. The book begins with an introductory essay by the editors, which provides an overview of the state of contemporary philosophy of mind, locating the articles to follow within that context. The individual chapters of Content, Consciousness and Perception are professional contributions to their respective areas, of interest to any philosopher of mind. The volume as a whole is ideal for non-specialists and students interested in getting to grips with the state of the art in contemporary philosophy of mind. -/- Praise for the book: 'If you want to know what the next but one generation of philosophers of mind are thinking about now, *Content, Consciousness and Perception * is a terrific place to look. This wide-ranging international collection is relevant to psychologists and cognitive scientists as well as philosophers.' Tim Williamson Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford University. (shrink)

This chapter discusses eighteenth-century British theories of perception, beginning with George Berkeley’s Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision. The chapter traces Berkeley’s influence through Thomas Reid, David Hume, David Hartley, Adam Smith and Dugald Stewart. The chapter presents theories of perception in this time a place a primarily concerned with metaphysics, mind and methodology rather than epistemology.

Hamlyn's book is exactly what the subtitle says it is: a history of the philosophy of perception, where this is taken to be a part of what is now called the philosophy of mind, as distinguished from the theory of knowledge. He expounds and criticizes, clearly and carefully, the views of Western philosophers from the pre-Socratics to Ryle and Sartre, and in a final chapter of about ten pages he offers some conclusions of his own. He holds that (...) "in the primary sense, perception can signify any means whereby we come to recognize, identify or characterize something by means of the senses" ; that there is a conceptual connection between perception and sensation, in the sense that "an essential condition of our application of the concept of perception to a being of any kind is that such a being should have sense experiences or sensations" ; but that it is a mistake "to ask what experiences, processes or activities constitute perception... [although] this is just the question which has so often been asked in the history of philosophy and psychology". "An understanding of the concepts of sensation and perception comes... not by asking what experiences, processes or activities these terms stand for. It can come only as the result of an inquiry into the concepts which form the schemes to which these particular concepts belong". These schemes, Hamlyn says, center around the concept of knowledge, and include such concepts as those of identification, recognition, and awareness. (shrink)

At Phaedo 105c, Socrates introduces a type of explanation (αἰτία) he describes as “clever.” Rather than explaining a body’s hotness in terms of the body’s participation in the Form Hot, for example, the clever αἰτία attributes a body’s hotness to the presence of fire in the body. Traditional interpretations argue that the clever αἰτία accounts for the interaction between fire and the body in terms of logical entailment relationships among the Forms. On this view, fire makes bodies hot because fire (...) participates in the Form Fire and the Form Fire entails the Form Hot. In Part One of this paper, Jelinek shows that this traditional interpretation yields problematic results. In Part Two, Jelinek considers the possibility that the clever αἰτία is a hybrid explanation that invokes both Forms and particulars as irreducible sources of explanation. Though an explanation that invokes particulars as explanatory modes may seem at odds with Plato’s Form-based metaphysics, Jelinek shows that this kind of explanation can be plausibly attributed to him. This novel interpretation of the clever αἰτία attributes to Plato a more complex and nuanced understanding of explanation than previously thought. (shrink)

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. Requires signed TDF. ;A detailed exegetical account of Wittgenstein's remarks on aspect-perception with respect to pictures and language shows that their key conclusions can be applied to the field of psychological concepts as well. Comparison with Davidson's philosophy of language and action reveals that the confusions against which Wittgenstein is fighting are central to contemporary analytic philosophy; comparison with Heidegger's system of thought reveals striking structural analogies with Wittgenstein's positive conclusions. (...) However, Heidegger also attempts to generalise those conclusions far beyond even the field of psychological concepts, and uses them to ground an extensive metaphysical system; it is found that the relevant conclusions can indeed be generalised, but only if they are regarded as grammatical points and stripped of their pretensions to metaphysical insight. A concluding chapter shows that Wittgenstein's application of the concept of aspect-perception to issues in aesthetics confirms the nature and scope of the earlier exegetical interpretations offered in the thesis; it also shows that Heidegger's writings on similar issues can be best be understood and criticised if viewed once again as a distortion of grammatical points into metaphysical revelations. (shrink)

Perception is one of the most pervasive and puzzling problems in philosophy, generating a great deal of attention and controversy in philosophy of mind, psychology and metaphysics. If perceptual illusion and hallucination are possible, how can perception be what it intuitively seems to be, a direct and immediate access to reality? How can perception be both internally dependent and externally directed? Perception is an outstanding introduction to this fundamental topic, covering both the perennial and recent (...) work on the problem. Adam Pautz examines four of the most important theories of perception: the sense datum view; the internal physical state view; the representational view; and naïve realism, assessing each in turn. He also discusses the relationship between perception and the physical world and the issue of whether reality is as it appears. Useful examples are included throughout the book to illustrate the puzzles of perception, including hallucinations, illusions, the laws of appearance, blindsight, and neuroscientific explanations of our experience of pain, smell and color. The book covers both traditional philosophical arguments and more recent empirical arguments deriving from research in psychophysics and neuroscience. The addition of chapter summaries, suggestions for further reading and a glossary of terms make Perception essential reading for anyone studying the topic in detail, as well as for students of philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology and metaphysics. (shrink)

The philosophical issues raised by perception make it one of the central topics in the philosophical tradition. Debate about the nature of perceptual knowledge and the objects of perception comprises a thread that runs through the history of philosophy. In some historical periods the major issues have been predominantly epistemological and related to scepticism, but an adequate understanding of perception is important more widely, especially for metaphysics and the philosophy of mind. For this reason Barry Maund (...) provides an account of the major issues in the philosophy of perception that highlights the importance of a good theory of perception in a range of philosophical fields, while also seeking to be sensitive to the historical dimension of the subject. The work presents chapters on forms of natural realism; theories of perceptual experience; representationalism; the argument from illusion; phenomenological senses; types of perceptual content; the representationalist/intentionalist thesis; and adverbialist accounts of perceptual experience. The ideas of, among others, Austin, Dretske, Heidegger, Millikan, Putnam and Robinson are considered and the reader is given a philosophical framework within which to consider the issues. (shrink)

This chapter examines what Hume and Reid had to say about what Reid called our intellectual powers: sensation, conception, perception, memory, abstraction, judgement, and reasoning. In the process it examines their opposed views on the nature of mind, on the representation of space and the spatiality of mental content, on temporal experience and the metaphysics of time, on the conception of non-existent objects, and on conceivability and possibility. The chapter critically examines what each had to say (...) in his own defence and what Reid had to say in opposition to Hume, and conjectures what Hume might have said in response to Reid. (shrink)

Perceptual experience, that paradigm of subjectivity, constitutes our most immediate and fundamental access to the objective world. At least, this would seem to be so if commonsense realism is correct — if perceptual experience is (in general) an immediate awareness of mind-independent objects, and a source of direct knowledge of what such objects are like. Commonsense realism raises many questions. First, can we be more precise about its commitments? Does it entail any particular conception of the nature of perceptual experience (...) and its relation to perceived objects, or any particular view of the way perception yields knowledge? Second, what explains the apparent intuitive appeal of commonsense realism? Should we think of it as a kind of folk theory held by most human adults or is there a sense in which we are pre-theoretically committed to it — in virtue of the experience we enjoy or in virtue of the concepts we use or in virtue of the explanations we give? Third, is commonsense realism defensible, in the face of formidable challenges from epistemology, metaphysics and cognitive science? The project of the present volume is to advance our understanding of these issues and thus to shed light on the commitments and credentials of commonsense realism. As you may have guessed from the title, the volume also aims to highlight the key role the concept of causation plays in these debates. Central issues to be addressed include the status and nature of causal requirements on perception, the causal role of perceptual experience, and the relation between objective perception and causal thinking — issues that, as many chapters in the volume bring out, are inseparable from concerns with the very nature of causation. (shrink)

In the Anticipations, Kant defends the claim that all sensations must register on a purely subjective scale of response to stimuli, in order for sensation to be a possible source of knowledge. In this paper, I argue that Kant defends this claim in response to “scholasticism” or transcendental realism about sensation. The fact that all sensations are measurable on a subjective scale is the a priori content of the principle of the Anticipations, and, according to Kant, is a necessary condition (...) for building any systematic analysis of sensation. The anti-metaphysical arguments in the “Anticipations of Perception” are key building blocks of Kant’s transcendental idealism. (shrink)

In this essay I explore the controversial issue of sense perception in the Zhuangzi 莊子. Although scholars have not explicitly addressed this aspect of the Chinese text, a common assumption is that the Zhuangzi proposes a mysticism that undermines sense perception in favour of a transcendent self. After an overview of this interpretation, and after analysing some key passages of the text that deal with heart fasting (xinzhai 心齋), sitting and forgetting (zuowang 坐忘) and skill mastery, I demonstrate (...) that some interpreters of the Zhuangzi read the text as if it has a metaphysical bent, recommending that sense perception be transcended as a prerequisite to perfection. In contrast, my thesis is that the text does not propose a withdrawal from the senses and from the world, but rather warns about the danger of abiding to doctrinal knowledge, which has the consequence of a person losing their responsive awareness. Indeed, in the Zhuangzi, sense perception is not an impediment on the way to a supersensible reality, but an integral part of one's own being in the world. Through my analysis, I object to the idea that the Zhuangzi proposes a mystical union with something not immediately available, which moreover needs to be achieved by transcending the lived world that is encountered through sense perception. My view is that such a move not only postulates union with a transcendent entity, it also forces a dualism between a person's capacities. This is problematic because the Zhuangzi does not point to another world–in a two worlds theory–where one must ideally attain the condition of a transcendent self. On the contrary, in rejecting a univocal ethos, the text suggests one should keep responding to changing circumstances without turning one's perceptual awareness into entrenched habits. Thus, the Zhuangzi shows how sense perception should be seen, not as a “problem” but as an ethical possibility through which the univocity of doctrinal knowledge can be undermined. (shrink)

A highly technical theory of visual perception is developed in the first half of this psychological study with the aid of set-theoretical symbols and a complex array of variables ranging over states of the various sub-systems of the organism related to perception. In the later chapters the author describes several new and crucial experiments favoring the theory over other theories of perception, and discusses its philosophical implications for a behavioral account of mind. Those who wade through the (...) welter of symbols will find important material for a philosophy of perception in the theory and especially in the experiments, involving externally induced environmental changes which are corrected by the behavior of the organism over a period of time. --R. H. K. (shrink)

There are many aspects of the Ethics that seem to suggest, or perhaps even require the possibility of deducing finite modes from the infinite substance. Nonetheless, as many have noted even during Spinoza’s own time, it is far from clear that such a deduction can be successfully performed. In this chapter I argue that the expectation of a top-down deduction is unwarranted, and that interestingly enough, it is not only unwarranted with regard to Spinoza but with regard to Descartes (...) as well. I show this by pointing to the crucial role confusion plays for both, noting that our epistemic journey to clear and distinct or adequate knowledge begins with confusion, and that this trajectory is one of emending initially confused ideas. This shows that epistemically a bottom-up trajectory necessarily precedes a top-down one. My claim, however, goes beyond this point regarding the order of discovery. I argue that the state of confusion presupposes a plurality of finite modes, in Spinoza’s case, and substances and modes in Descartes’s. Confusion, I claim, amounts to an inadequate perception of an amalgam of ideas of a real plurality of things. Recognizing the metaphysical ground of confusion along with its central epistemic role brings to light the artificiality, and indeed ultimately the impossibility of a top-down deduction which is divorced from a preceding bottom-up analysis. (shrink)

This dissertation aims to revive wave theory in the philosophy of sound. Wave theory identifies sounds with compression waves. Despite its wide acceptance in the scientific community as the default position, many philosophers have rejected wave theory and opted for different versions of distal theory instead. According to this current majority view, a sound has its stationary location at its source. I argue against this and other alternative philosophical theories of sound and develop wave theory into a more defensible form. (...) Philosophers of sound tend to emphasise how sounds are experienced to be in their arguments. Most often, it is assumed that that which appears to be a distally located bearer of auditory properties in an auditory experience is a sound. Chapter 1 argues that if this distal entity is the sound source instead, many of the existing theories of sound will be severely affected. Chapter 2 discusses auditory perception and criticises the common assumption that we hear non-sound entities in virtue of hearing sounds. I show that this assumption begs the question against certain theories of sound and that the contrary view that sound sources can be directly heard is more plausible. If sound sources can be directly heard, then features commonly attributed to sounds based on auditory experiences might rather be features of sound sources. I examine eight of such features in Chapter 3. Only four of them survive. Chapters 4 and 5 review the existing theories of sound. After a taxonomy of existing theories of sound, each theory is criticised one-by-one. Some of them are problematic precisely because they rely on the implausible assumption that that which appears to be distally located in an auditory experience is a sound rather than a sound source. Lastly, Chapter 6 focuses on wave theory. It begins with two positive arguments for wave theory in general, followed by my replies to two common objections in the literature. I then move on to develop my version of wave theory. There are two core aspects of my view. The first one is a metaphysics of compression waves; the second is an account of what it is to hear compression waves. After comparing my view with a similar theory, I demonstrate the explanatory power of my view in two steps. First, the eight commonly accepted features of sounds examined in Chapter 3 are revisited. It turns out that my view can accommodate all of them. Second, explanations for four special sound-related phenomena are offered at the end of the chapter. I conclude in the last chapter with the suggestion that, as a philosopher, the best way to defend wave theory is to offer a better understanding of auditory perception which explains how compression waves are experienced. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Deleuze, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty: The Logics and Pragmatics of Creation, Affective Life, and Perception by Dorothea E. OlkowskiElodie BoublilOLKOWSKI, Dorothea E. Deleuze, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty: The Logics and Pragmatics of Creation, Affective Life, and Perception. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2021. 180 pp. Cloth, $63.00; paper, $28.00[End Page 152]Dorothea E. Olkowski's latest book carefully examines "the relationship between the creation of ideas and their actualization in relation to semiology, (...) logic and the cosmos in the philosophies of Deleuze, Bergson, and Merleau-Ponty." However, this work is neither an extensive or historical account of Deleuze's, Bergson's, and Merleau-Ponty's philosophies, nor an attempt to homogenize their views on space, time, or perception. Instead, it subtly compares their differences and similarities to move beyond metaphysical dualism, and fruitfully rethinks the relations between formal logic and ontology. Indeed, the author aims to draw a "theory of form," based on the logic of sensation, ultimately designed "to take the place of a theory of the real, of material physical forces."Chapter 1 retraces the history of postmodernist claims and their philosophical legacy. Olkowski explains that postmodernism is not first and foremost a political worldview or a debunking of objectivity in natural sciences. Instead, "it begins as a formal system or series of formal systems." Olkowski explores how Deleuze draws on the knowledge of modern science and logic (Bolzano, Cavaillès) and on Bergson's critical analysis of it to elaborate his logic of sensation. Bergson's conception of affectivity impacted Deleuze's and Merleau-Ponty's theories of corporeality and sensation, and their understanding of perception. Bergson's concept of "body image" specifically influenced Deleuze's elaboration of the concept of "movement-image," through which he tried to overcome the dichotomy set up by mind–body dualism.Chapter 2 focuses on Deleuze and Guattari's critique of logic as an attempt to find a third way between idealism and materialism and to overcome the disconnection between formal logic and lived experience. It reviews their critique of Euclidean geometry, their objections to formal logic as set out by Frege and Russell, and their assessment of phenomenology in order to eventually show Deleuze's affinity with Peirce's pragmatist approach. Then, the author aims to determine if Deleuze's attempt could be compatible with the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and Bergson's understanding of quality and multiplicity.Chapter 3 focuses on Bergson. Recalling the controversy with Russell, Einstein, and Langevin, Olkowski refers to Merleau-Ponty's defense of Bergson's concept of intuition to prove the accuracy of his reflection on creative forces and pure duration. As she explains, "[T]he intent here is to clarify the relations between these different aspects of Bergson's thought and draw out how Deleuze makes use of these structures derived from Bergson's philosophy." This leads her to explore, more specifically, how Deleuze reworks the concept of "multiplicity" along the lines of Bergson's analysis of the élan vital.In chapter 4 the author focuses on Deleuze's work on cinema to deepen the philosophical correlation between Bergson's concepts, Deleuze's analysis, and the influences of Merleau-Ponty and Pierce. It aims to rethink the relation between movement and time, notably through the notions of time-image and movement-image. Olkowski notably showcases Deleuze's concept of destiny, "which is the pure power of time that [End Page 153] overflows all possible reaction. It defeats, immobilizes, and petrifies figures in their own affectivity; it sends them to their fate, destroying conventions along the way. For Merleau-Ponty, as for Bergson, acts are still possible in a network of temporal relations so that motion and time are destiny but differently than for Deleuze."Chapter 5 addresses the Phenomenology of Perception and how Merleau-Ponty provides an opportunity to rethink perception. In this book and his Courses on Nature, Merleau-Ponty "does not dismiss either position—that of objective science or that of the natural attitude—but argues that although each contains an element of truth, it is perception and only perception that allows us to bridge the gap between physical reality and behavior/comportment." Deleuze will depart from... (shrink)

How are we aware of time? How do we perceive change and duration? What is it like to experience temporality as opposed to spatiality? Does the way we experience time tell us anything about the nature of time? This chapter focusses on some of the most pertinent questions in the philosophy of time—on the relation between subjective and objective time, on the metaphysical and psychological priority of the present, on the phenomenal difference between our experiences of space and our (...) experiences of time, and on how to reconcile relativistic time concepts with our common-sense ideas. It gives us an interesting in sight into leading debates on the topic, largely within the phenomenological and hermeneutic philosophical traditions. This article intends to complement the chapter by providing a brief overview over views and debates about time consciousness in contemporary analytic philosophy. (shrink)

I conclude that it is more accurate to say that, rather than trying to make logic metaphysical, Leibniz tries, in the context of a theistic system, to make metaphysics logical. ;I begin with a study of the principle of identity of indiscernibles, and show how it is best thought of as a principle which follows from a metaphysical interpretation of the principle of sufficient reason. It has been traditional to interpret the principle of identity of indiscernibles as primarily a (...) merely logical principle, and thus as either trivially true, if Leibniz succeeds in proving it, or else false or contingently true. I argue that it is instead necessarily true in a non-trivial or metaphysical sense, because the principles on which it is based are themselves of this metaphysical character, contrary to what is often assumed. ;In the second chapter, I show how God's activity and a metaphysical interpretation of the principle of sufficient reason underlie Leibniz's account of space and time. ;In the third chapter, I discuss the principle of sufficient reason in detail, showing that it actually consists of three separate principles: the principle of grounds, that every true proposition has a proof a priori; the principle of reason, that God does nothing without a sufficient reason; and the principle of causation, that every event has a cause. That each of these is considered a principle of sufficient reason is explained by Leibniz's equivocal use of the term 'reason.' I show that, of the various versions of the principle of sufficient reason, only the principle of reasons provides an adequate foundation for Leibniz's principle of identity of indiscernibles and theory of space and time. Furthermore, since chapters one and two show how the activity of God is presupposed by Leibniz's metaphysics, for Leibniz to derive his metaphysics from his logic, as some would have us suppose, he would have to provide a satisfactory a priori demonstration of God's existence. But this, I argue, he cannot do. Thus God's existence and rationality, rather than subject-predicate logic, are the foundations of Leibniz's metaphysics. ;It is commonplace, when writing about Leibniz, to give primacy to his logic over his metaphysics, and indeed to try to assimilate the latter to the former. In this essay, however, I give priority to Leibniz's metaphysical pronouncements, apart, as much as possible, from logical and linguistic considerations. (shrink)

Henri Bergson (1859-1941) was once the most famous philosopher in the world, but his reputation waned in the latter half of the 20th century. Barry Allen here makes the case for Bergson as a great philosopher, one whose thought has much to contribute to contemporary philosophical questions. Living in Time presents chapters on each of Bergson's four major works, explaining his theories of time, perception, memory, and panpsychic consciousness, his innovative concept of virtual existence, his objection to Darwin, his (...) controversy with Einstein, his philosophy of creative evolution, and his social philosophy of closed and open society. In particular Allen focusses on Bergson's powerful ideas on time. Classical arguments for determinism fallaciously apply spatial concepts to consciousness; once we take time seriously, which means acknowledging its reality as duration and its difference from space, Bergson showed that the arguments for determinism become insupportable. Bergson's ideas on time and evolution offer a comparison with Nietzsche, which Allen develops, exposing both philosophical concurrence and systematic difference. The book's conclusion discusses the question of Bergson and naturalism and summarizes the ontology of the virtual that emerges as a core part of Bergson's thought. (shrink)

Purpose: This paper aims at exposing and appraising the arguments of A.J. Ayer against metaphysics, as reflected in the first chapter of his book, Language, Truth and Logic. It shall explore the basic assumptions, content and concerns of the metaphysical enterprise, and place them in careful juxtaposition with A.J. Ayer’s positivist assumptions in order to discover whether the claims he makes regarding metaphysics are really valid or not. The conclusion will emphasize the relevance and irrefutability of (...) class='Hi'>metaphysics. Methodology: The work is expository, analytic, critical and evaluative, in its methodology. Findings: Sir Alfred Julius Ayer was an English philosopher who developed key features of logical positivism. His book Language, Truth, and Logic (1936) is one of the most influential philosophy books in the 20th century, addressing questions of reality, perception, knowledge and meaning. In it Ayer explains important positivist ideas, like the principle of verifiability as a criterion of meaning, the rejection of metaphysics, and the emotivist theory of ethics. In Ayer’s logical empiricism, philosophy is no longer seen as a metaphysical concern, nor as an attempt to provide speculative truths about the nature of ultimate reality. Instead, philosophy is seen as an activity of defining and clarifying the logical relationships of empirical propositions. Unique Contribution to theory, practice and policy (recommendation): The ratiocinative discussion of A. J. Ayer’s rejection of Metaphysics, offers an alternative perspective on how Metaphysics should be construed, given its centrality to, and in-eliminability in philosophical discourses. (shrink)

This paper begins with a Davidsonian puzzle in the epistemology of perception and introduces two solutions to that puzzle: the Truth-Maker View (TMV) and the Content Model. The paper goes on to elaborate (TMV), elements of which can be found in the work of Kalderon (2011) and Brewer (2011). The central tenant of (TMV) is the claim that one's reason for one's perceptual belief should, in all cases, be identified with some item one perceives which makes the proposition believed (...) true. I defend an argument against (TMV) which appeals to (a) the claim that the reason for which one believes should always to be identified with the explanans of the rationalising explanation to which one's belief is subject and (b) the claim that the explanantia of rationalising explanations must be identified with truths. I finish by replying to two objections to the argument. (shrink)