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632AnimalsIn Janet Broughton & John Carriero (eds.), Companion to Descartes, Blackwell. 2008.This chapter considers philosophical problems concerning non-human (and sometimes human) animals, including their metaphysical, physical, and moral status, their origin, what makes them alive, their functional organization, and the basis of their sensitive and cognitive capacities. I proceed by assuming what most of Descartes’s followers and interpreters have held: that Descartes proposed that animals lack sentience, feeling, and genuinely cognitive representations of things. (Some scholars inte…Read more
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603Spatial Perception and Geometry in Kant and HelmholtzPSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1984. 1984.This paper examines Helmholtz's attempt to use empirical psychology to refute certain of Kant's epistemological positions. Particularly, Helmholtz believed that his work in the psychology of visual perception showed Kant's doctrine of the a priori character of spatial intuition to be in error. Some of Helmholtz's arguments are effective, but this effectiveness derives from his arguments to show the possibility of obtaining evidence that the structure of physical space is non-Euclidean, and these…Read more
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138The Sixth Meditation: Mind-Body Relation, External Objects, and Sense PerceptionIn Andreas Kemmerling (ed.), Meditationen über die erste Philosophie, Akademie. pp. 123-146. 2009.Descartes entitled the Sixth Meditation "The existence of material things, and the real distinction between mind and body." But these topics take up only two paragraphs, about one-third of the way into the Sixth Meditation (which is the longest of the six). The other topics in the Meditation partly pertain to the cognitive faculties that a seeker after knowledge must employ: senses, imagination, and intellect. They also concern the mind–body relation: not only is it to be shown that mind and bod…Read more
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77Helmholtz and classicism: The science of aesthetics and the aesthetics of scienceIn David Cahan (ed.), Hermann von Helmholtz and the Foundations of Nineteenth-Century Science, University of California Press. pp. 522--58. 1993.This chapter examines the Helmholtz's changing conceptions of the relation between scientific cognition (the thought processes of the investigator) and artistic cognition. It begins with two case studies: Helmholtz's application of sensory physiology and psychology respectively to music and to painting. Consideration of these concrete cases leads to Helmholtz's account of the methodology of aesthetics, and specifically to his formulation of the distinction between the *Geisteswissenschaften* and…Read more
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159Rationalist Roots of Modern PsychologyIn Sarah Robins, John Francis Symons & Paco Calvo (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Psychology, Routledge. pp. 3--21. 2009.The philosophers René Descartes (1596–1650), Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715), Benedict Spinoza (1632–77), and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) are grouped together as rationalists because they held that human beings possess a faculty of reason that produces knowledge independently of the senses. In this regard, they contrast with empiricist philosophers, such as John Locke and David Hume, who believed that all knowledge arises from the senses. The rationalists contended that proper use of r…Read more
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83Reason, Nature, and God in DescartesIn Stephen Voss (ed.), Essays on the Philosophy and Science of Rene Descartes, Oxford University Press. 1993.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
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28Epilogue: Advances and open questionsIn Gary Hatfield & Sarah Allred (eds.), Visual Experience: Sensation, Cognition, and Constancy, Oxford University Press. pp. 232-241. 2012.The term “perceptual constancy” was used by the Gestalt theorists in the early part of the twentieth century (e.g., Koffka 1935, 34, 90) to refer to the tendency of perception to remain invariant over changes of viewing distance, viewing angle, and conditions of illumination. This tendency toward constancy is remarkable: every change in the viewing distance, position, and illumination is necessarily accompanied by a change in the local proximal (retinal) stimulation, and yet perception remains r…Read more
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65René DescartesStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2008.This version has been superseded by the one published in Spring, 2014.
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616Psychology as a natural science in the eighteenth centuryRevue 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
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579Color perception and neural encoding: Does metameric matching entail a loss of information?In David Hull & Mickey Forbes (eds.), PSA 1992: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, Volume One: Contributed Papers, Philosophy of Science Association. pp. 492-504. 1992.It seems intuitively obvious that metameric matching of color samples entails a loss of information, for spectrophotometrically diverse materials appear the same. This intuition implicitly relies on a conception of the function of color vision and on a related conception of how color samples should be individuated. It assumes that the function of color vision is to distinguish among spectral energy distributions, and that color samples should be individuated by their physical properties. I chall…Read more
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1616Psychological Experiments and Phenomenal Experience in Size and Shape ConstancyPhilosophy of Science 81 (5): 940-953. 2014.Some experiments in perceptual psychology measure perceivers’ phenomenal experiences of objects versus their cognitive assessments of object properties. Analyzing such experiments, this article responds to Pizlo’s claim that much work on shape constancy before 1985 confused problems of shape ambiguity with problems of shape constancy. Pizlo fails to grasp the logic of experimental designs directed toward phenomenal aspects of shape constancy. In the domain of size perception, Granrud’s studies o…Read more
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54Kant on the Phenomenology of Touch and VisionIn Alix Cohen (ed.), Kant's Lectures on Anthropology: A Critical Guide, Cambridge University Press. 2014.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
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86Visual Experience: Sensation, Cognition, and Constancy (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2012.Seeing happens effortlessly and yet is endlessly complex. Among the most fascinating aspects of visual perception is its stability and constancy. As we shift our gaze or move about the world, the light projected onto the retinas is constantly changing. Yet the surrounding objects appear stable in their properties. Psychologists have long been interested in the constancies. They have asked questions such as: How good is constancy? Is constancy a fact about how things look, or is it a product of o…Read more
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20Neurophilosophy meets psychology: Reduction, autonomy, and empirical constraintsCognitive Neuropsychology 5 723-46. 1988.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.
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82Descartes' naturalism about the mentalIn Stephen Gaukroger, John Schuster & John Sutton (eds.), Descartes' Natural Philosophy, Routledge. 2000.The chapter advances two theses involving Descartes and the mind. The first concerns Descartes' conception of mental faculties, particularly the intellect. As I read the _Meditations_, a fundamental aim of that work is to make the reader aware of the deliverances of the pure intellect, perhaps for the first time. Descartes' project is to alter the reader's Aristotelian beliefs about the faculty of the intellect and its relation to the senses, while at the same time coaxing her to use the pure in…Read more
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34The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1680–1760 (review)British Journal for the History of Philosophy 24 (1): 181-185. 2016.Review of: Stephen Gaukroger: The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1680-1760. Oxford: Clarendon, 2010, pp. ix+505. £47.00 (hb). ISBN 9780199594931. This volume is the second of a projected six-volume work on the shaping of modern cognitive values through the emergence of a scientific culture, a phenomenon that Gaukroger takes to be specific to the West. The volume ranges from Newton’s initial publications on optics to the French Enlightenme…Read more
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66Perceived Shape at a Slant as a Function of Processing Time and Processing LoadJournal 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
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618In the Eye's Mind: Vision and the Helmholtz-Hering Controversy by R. Steven Turner (review)Isis 86 (4): 664-665. 1995.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.
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577Sense-data and the philosophy of mind: Russell, James, and MachPrincipia 6 (2): 203-230. 2002.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
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720Transparency of Mind: The Contributions of Descartes, Leibniz, and Berkeley to the Genesis of the Modern SubjectIn Hubertus Busche (ed.), Departure for modern Europe: a handbook of early modern philosophy (1400-1700), Felix Meiner Verlag. 2011.The chapter focuses on attributions of the transparency of thought to early modern figures, most notably Descartes. Many recent philosophers assume that Descartes believed the mind to be “transparent”: since all mental states are conscious, we are therefore aware of them all, and indeed incorrigibly know them all. Descartes, and Berkeley too, do make statements that seem to endorse both aspects of the transparency theses (awareness of all mental states; incorrigibility). However, they also make …Read more
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151Force (God) in Descartes' physicsStudies 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
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25Reason, Nature, and God in DescartesScience 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.
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82Perception in Philosophy and Psychology in the 19th and Early 20th CenturiesIn Mohan Matthen (ed.), Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Perception, Oxford University Press. 2015.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; a…Read more
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124Descartes' physiology and its relation to his psychologyIn 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
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633Representation and constraints: The inverse problem and the structure of visual spaceActa Psychologica 114 355-378. 2003.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
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46On Natural Geometry and Seeing Distance Directly in Descartes.In Vincenzo De Risi (ed.), Mathematizing Space: The Objects of Geometry from Antiquity to the Early Modern Age, Birkhäuser. pp. 157-91. 2015.As the word “optics” was understood from antiquity into and beyond the early modern period, it did not mean simply the physics and geometry of light, but meant the “theory of vision” and included what we should now call physiological and psychological aspects. From antiquity, these aspects were subject to geometrical analysis. Accordingly, the geometry of visual experience has long been an object of investigation. This chapter examines accounts of size and distance perception in antiquity (Eucli…Read more
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54Representation without symbol systemsSocial Research: An International Quarterly 51 (4): 1019-1045. 1984.The concept of representation has become almost inextricably bound to the concept of symbol systems. the concepts is nowhere more prevalent than in descriptions of "internal representations." These representations are thought to occur in an internal symbol system that allows the brain to store and use information. In this paper we explore a different approach to understanding psychological processes, one that retains a commitment to representations and computations but that is not based on the i…Read more
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153Perceiving as Having Subjectively Conditioned AppearancesPhilosophical 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
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115The Routledge Guidebook to Descartes' MeditationsRoutledge. 2014.Descartes is widely regarded to be the father of modern philosophy and his Meditations is among the most important philosophical texts ever written. _The Routledge Guidebook to Descartes’ Meditations_ introduces the major themes in Descartes’ great book and acts as a companion for reading this key work, examining: The context of Descartes’ work and the background to his writing; Each separate part of the text in relation to its goals, meanings and impact; The reception the book received when fir…Read more
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