•  93
    Cartesian Psychology of Antoine Le Grand
    In Mihnea Dobre Tammy Nyden (ed.), Cartesian Empiricisms, Springer. pp. 251-274. 2013.
    In the Aristotelian curriculum, De anima or the study of the soul fell under the rubric of physics. This area of study covered the vital (“vegetative”), sensitive, and rational powers of the soul. Descartes’ substance dualism restricted reason or intellect, and conscious sensation, to human minds. Having denied mind to nonhuman animals, Descartes was required to explain all animal behavior using material mechanisms possessing only the properties of size, shape, position, and motion. Within the f…Read more
  •  1716
    The history of philosophy as philosophy
    In Tom Sorell & Graham Alan John Rogers (eds.), Analytic philosophy and history of philosophy, Oxford University Press. pp. 82-128. 2005.
    The chapter begins with an initial survey of ups and downs of contextualist history of philosophy during the twentieth century in Britain and America, which finds that historically serious history of philosophy has been on the rise. It then considers ways in which the study of past philosophy has been used and is used in philosophy, and makes a case for the philosophical value and necessity of a contextually oriented approach. It examines some uses of past texts and of history that reveal limits…Read more
  •  129
    Perceived Shape at a Slant as a Function of Processing Time and Processing Load
    with William Epstein and Gerard Muise
    Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 3. 1977.
    Shape and slant judgments of rotated or frontoparallel ellipses were elicited from three groups of 10 subjects. A masking stimulus was introduced to control processing time. Backward masking trials were presented with interstimulus intervals of 0, 25, and 50 msec, Reduction of processing time altered shape judgments in the direction of projective shape and slant judgments in the direction of frontoparallelness. This finding is consistent with the shape-slant invariance hypothesis. In order to st…Read more
  •  58
    A commentary on Neurophilosophy: Toward a unified science of the mind/brain, by Patricia Smith Churchland. Cambridge, Mass.: The M.I.T. Press/Bradford, 1986, pp. xi + 546, $27.50, ISBN 0-262-03116-7.
  •  1420
    The theory of knowledge in early twentieth-century Anglo American philosophy was oriented toward phenomenally described cognition. There was a healthy respect for the mind-body problem, which meant that phenomena in both the mental and physical domains were taken seriously. Bertrand Russell's developing position on sense-data and momentary particulars drew upon, and ultimately became like, the neutral monism of Ernst Mach and William James. Due to a more recent behaviorist and physicalist inspir…Read more
  •  131
    The Evolution of Mind, Brain, and Culture (edited book)
    with Holly Pittman
    University of Pennsylvania Press. 2013.
    Descartes boldly claimed: "I think, therefore I am." But one might well ask: Why do we think? How? When and why did our human ancestors develop language and culture? In other words, what makes the human mind human? _Evolution of Mind, Brain, and Culture_ offers a comprehensive and scientific investigation of these perennial questions. Fourteen essays bring together the work of archaeologists, cultural and physical anthropologists, psychologists, philosophers, geneticists, a neuroscientist, and a…Read more
  •  1096
    Review of: R. Steven Turner, In the Eye's Mind: Vision and the Helmholtz-Hering Controversy. xiv + 338 pp., frontis., illus., figs., tables, bibl., index. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994.
  •  84
    Reason, Nature, and God in Descartes
    Science in Context 3 (1): 175-201. 1989.
    This journal article has been superseded by a revised version, published in the collection _Essays on the Philosophy and Science of Rene Descartes_, ed. by Stephen Voss (Oxford University Press, 1993), 259–287.
  •  56
    The chapter examines some common assumptions regarding the shape of the history of theories of mind. It questions the conception that the Scientific Revolution resulted in placing the mind “outside of nature.” During the seventeenth century, the followers of Descartes routinely placed study of the mind, or, at least, mind–body interaction, within “physics” considered as a science of nature in general (and so including physics in the narrow sense, biology, and psychology). By the end of the eight…Read more
  •  219
    Force (God) in Descartes' physics
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 10 (2): 113-140. 1979.
    It is difficult to evaluate the role of activity - of force or of that which has causal efficacy - in Descartes’ natural philosophy. On the one hand, Descartes claims to include in his natural philosophy only that which can be described geometrically, which amounts to matter (extended substance) in motion (where this motion is described kinematically).’ Yet on the other hand, rigorous adherence to a purely geometrical description of matter in motion would make it difficult to account for the int…Read more
  •  752
    Visual space can be distinguished from physical space. The first is found in visual experience, while the second is defined independently of perception. Theorists have wondered about the relation between the two. Some investigators have concluded that visual space is non-Euclidean, and that it does not have a single metric structure. Here it is argued that visual space exhibits contraction in all three dimensions with increasing distance from the observer, that experienced features of this contr…Read more
  •  39
    Descartes set for himself the ambitious program of accounting for the functions of the Aristotelian vegetative and sensitive souls without invoking souls or the faculties or powers of souls in his explanations. He rejects the notion that the soul is hylomorphically present in the organs of the body so as to carry out vital and sensory functions. Rather, the body’s organs operate in a purely mechanical fashion. That is what is involved in “mechanizing” these phenomena. The role of the soul is res…Read more
  •  218
    Descartes' physiology and its relation to his psychology
    In John Cottingham (ed.), The Cambridge companion to Descartes, Cambridge University Press. pp. 335--370. 1992.
    Descartes understood the subject matter of physics (or natural philosophy) to encompass the whole of nature, including living things. It therefore comprised not only nonvital phenomena, including those we would now denominate as physical, chemical, minerological, magnetic, and atmospheric; it also extended to the world of plants and animals, including the human animal (with the exception of those aspects of the human mind that Descartes assigned to solely to thinking substance: pure intellect an…Read more
  •  236
    Perceiving as Having Subjectively Conditioned Appearances
    Philosophical Topics 44 (2): 149-178. 2016.
    This paper develops an appearance view of perception (focusing on vision). When we see an object, we see it by having it appear some way to us. We see the object, not the appearance; but we see the object via the appearance. The appearance is subjectively conditioned: aspects of it depend on attributes of the subject. We mentally have the appearance and can reflect on it as an appearance. But in the primary instance, of veridical perception, it is the object that we focus on and experience. I co…Read more
  •  1113
    Descartes was both metaphysician and natural philosopher. He used his metaphysics to ground portions of his physics. However, as should be a commonplace but is not, he did not think he could spin all of his physics out of his metaphysics a priori, and in fact he both emphasized the need for appeals to experience in his methodological remarks on philosophizing about nature and constantly appealed to experience in describing his own philosophy of nature. During the 1630s, he offered empirical supp…Read more
  •  307
    The reality of qualia
    Erkenntnis 66 (1): 133--168. 2007.
    This paper argues for the reality of qualia as aspects of phenomenal experience. The argument focuses on color vision and develops a dispositionalist, subjectivist account of what it is for an object to be colored. I consider objections to dispositionalism on epistemological, metaphysical, and 'ordinary' grounds. I distinguish my representative realism from sense-data theories and from recent 'representational' or 'intentional' theories, and I argue that there is no good reason to adopt a physi…Read more
  •  6446
    Behaviourism and Psychology
    In Thomas Baldwin (ed.), The Cambridge History of Philosophy 1870–1945, Cambridge University Press. pp. 640-48. 2003.
    Behaviorism was a peculiarly American phenomenon. As a school of psychology it was founded by John B. Watson (1878-1958) and grew into the neobehaviorisms of the 1920s, 30s and 40s. Philosophers were involved from the start, prefiguring the movement and endeavoring to define or redefine its tenets. Behaviorism expressed the naturalistic bent in American thought, which came in response to the prevailing philosophical idealism and was inspired by developments in natural science itself. There were …Read more
  •  218
    L’attention chez Descartes: aspect mental et aspect physiologique
    Les Etudes Philosophiques 171 (1): 7-25. 2017.
    In philosophical writings from Descartes’ time, the topic of attention attracted notice but not systematic treatment. In Descartes’s own writings, attention was not given the kind of extended analysis that he devoted to the theory of the senses, or the passions, or to the intellect and will. Nonetheless, phenomena of attention arose in relation to these other topics and were discussed in terms of mental operations and, where appropriate, relations to bodily organs. Although not producing a syste…Read more
  •  1358
    The brain's 'new' science: Psychology, neurophysiology, and constraint
    Philosophy of Science 67 (3): 388-404. 2000.
    There is a strong philosophical intuition that direct study of the brain can and will constrain the development of psychological theory. When this intuition is tested against case studies on the neurophysiology and psychology of perception and memory, it turns out that psychology has led the way toward knowledge of neurophysiology. An abstract argument is developed to show that psychology can and must lead the way in neuroscientific study of mental function. The opposing intuition is based on ma…Read more
  •  1173
    Two stories have dominated the historiography of early modern philosophy: one in which a seventeenth century Age of Reason spawned the Enlightenment, and another in which a skeptical crisis cast a shadow over subsequent philosophy, resulting in ever narrower "limits to knowledge." I combine certain elements common to both into a third narrative, one that begins by taking seriously seventeenth-century conceptions of the topics and methods central to the rise of a "new" philosophy. In this revisio…Read more
  •  50
    Mandelbaum adopted a middle course between physicalistic scientific realism and phenomenalistic "ordinary language" direct realism. He affirmed the relevance of scientific knowledge for epistemology, but did not attempt to reduce the content of perception to physical properties. Rather, he developed a critical direct realism, according to which we see bodies by means of having phenomenal experience. This phenomenal experience was not, however, to be equated with the sense-data of the usual rep…Read more
  •  68
    This chapter compares rationalist theories of sense perception to previously held theories of perception (especially of vision) and examines rationalist accounts of sensory qualities and sensory representation, of the role of the sense-based passions in guiding behavior, of the epistemological benefits and dangers of sense perception, and of mind–body relations. Each section begins with Descartes, the first major rationalist of the seventeenth century. The other major rationalists, Malebranche, …Read more
  •  141
    Recent Cartesian scholarship postulates two Descartes, separating Descartes into a scientist and a metaphysician. The purpose varies, but one has been to show that the metaphysical Descartes, of the Meditations, is less genuine than the scientific Descartes. Accordingly, discussion of God and the soul, the evil demon, and the non-deceiving God were elements of rhetorical strategy to please theologians, not of serious philosophical argumentation. I agree in finding two Descartes, but the two I id…Read more
  •  137
    Hume, space, and the self (review)
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 17 (5). 2009.
    Review of: Marina Frasca-Spada: Space and the Self in Hume’s Treatise. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. pp. xiii + 220. £26.99, $43.00, pbk. ISBN 9780521891622
  •  1900
    Radical Empiricism, Critical Realism, and American Functionalism: James and Sellars
    Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 5 (1): 129-53. 2015.
    As British and American idealism waned, new realisms displaced them. The common background of these new realisms emphasized the problem of the external world and the mind-body problem, as bequeathed by Reid, Hamilton, and Mill. During this same period, academics on both sides of the Atlantic recognized that the natural sciences were making great strides. Responses varied. In the United States, philosophical response focused particularly on functional psychology and Darwinian adaptedness. This ar…Read more
  •  1449
    Psychology as a natural science in the eighteenth century
    Revue de Synthèse 115 (3-4): 375-391. 1994.
    Psychology considered as a natural science began as Aristotelian "physics" or "natural philosophy" of the soul. C. Wolff placed psychology under metaphysics, coordinate with cosmology. Scottish thinkers placed it within moral philosophy, but distinguished its "physical" laws from properly moral laws (for guiding conduct). Several Germans sought to establish an autonomous empirical psychology as a branch of natural science. British and French visual theorists developed mathematically precise theo…Read more
  •  63
    Epistemology and Cognition (review)
    Philosophical Review 98 (3): 386. 1989.
    Review of: Epistemology and Cognition. By Alvin I. Goldman. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1986. Pp. viii, 437. $27.50.
  •  1223
    Psychology old and new
    In Thomas Baldwin (ed.), The Cambridge History of Philosophy 1870–1945, Cambridge University Press. 2003.
    During the period 1870-1914 the existing discipline of psychology was transformed. British thinkers including Spencer, Lewes, and Romanes allied psychology with biology and viewed mind as a function of the organism for adapting to the environment. British and German thinkers called attention to social and cultural factors in the development of individual human minds. In Germany and the United States a tradition of psychology as a laboratory science soon developed, which was called a 'new psychol…Read more
  •  103
    This chapter deals with Immanuel Kant's remarks on touch and vision in the context of his pragmatic anthropology, by considering his views of the scope, aims, and methods of that fledgling discipline. Kant supports his discussion with appeals to observation and experience that form a kind of everyday phenomenology of sensory experience. The chapter considers Kant's notion of the relation between the pragmatic and the theoretical, including his remarks that a pragmatic anthropology does not prese…Read more
  •  1874
    This chapter poses questions about the existence and character of the Scientific Revolution by deriving its initial categories of analysis and its initial understanding of the intellectual scene from the writings of the seventeenth century, and by following the evolution of these initial categories in succeeding centuries. This project fits the theme of cross cultural transmission and appropriation -- a theme of the present volume -- if one takes the notion of a culture broadly, so that, say, se…Read more