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25Psychology, epistemology, and the problem of the external world : Russell and beforeIn Erich H. Reck (ed.), The Historical turn in Analytic Philosophy, Palgrave-macmillan. 2013.This chapter examines Russell’s appreciation of the relevance of psychology for the theory of knowledge, especially in connection with the problem of the external world, and the background for this appreciation in British philosophy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Russell wrote in 1914 that “the epistemological order of deduction includes both logical and psychological considerations.” Indeed, the notion of what is “psychologically derivative” played a crucial role in his epistemolog…Read more
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73Introduction: The Evolution of Mind, Brain, and CultureIn Gary Hatfield & Holly Pittman (eds.), The Evolution of Mind, Brain, and Culture, University of Pennsylvania Press. pp. 1-44. 2013.This introductory chapter surveys some basic findings on primate evolution and the evolution of mind; examines socially transmitted traditions in relation to the concept of culture; recounts the sources of evidence regarding the evolution of mind and culture; charts the history of evolutionary approaches to mind and behavior since Darwin; reviews several prominent theoretical syntheses concerning the evolution of the human mind and behavior; and, along the way, introduces the specific questions …Read more
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1512The cognitive facultiesIn Daniel Garber & Michael Ayers (eds.), The Cambridge history of seventeenth-century philosophy, Cambridge University Press. 1998.During the seventeenth century the major cognitive faculties--sense, imagination, memory, and understanding or intellect--became the central focus of argument in metaphysics and epistemology to an extent not seen before. The theory of the intellect, long an important auxiliary to metaphysics, became the focus of metaphysical dispute, especially over the scope and powers of the intellect and the existence of a `pure' intellect. Rationalist metaphysicians such as Descartes, Spinoza, and Malebranch…Read more
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2700Gestalt psychology and the philosophy of mindPhilosophical Psychology 7 (2): 163-181. 1994.The Gestalt psychologists adopted a set of positions on mind-body issues that seem like an odd mix. They sought to combine a version of naturalism and physiological reductionism with an insistence on the reality of the phenomenal and the attribution of meanings to objects as natural characteristics. After reviewing basic positions in contemporary philosophy of mind, we examine the Gestalt position, characterizing it m terms of phenomenal realism and programmatic reductionism. We then distinguish…Read more
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94Natural Geometry in Descartes and KeplerRes Philosophica 92 (1): 117-148. 2015.According to Kepler and Descartes, the geometry of the triangle formed by the two eyes when focused on a single point affords perception of the distance to that point. Kepler characterized the processes involved as associative learning. Descartes described the processes as a “ natural geometry.” Many interpreters have Descartes holding that perceivers calculate the distance to the focal point using angle-side-angle, calculations that are reduced to unnoticed mental habits in adult vision. This a…Read more
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63Cartesian Psychology of Antoine Le GrandIn Mihnea Dobre & Tammy Nyden (eds.), Cartesian Empiricisms, Springer. pp. 251-274. 2014.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
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73The Evolution of Mind, Brain, and Culture (edited book)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
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65Immanuel Kant: Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics: That Will Be Able to Come Forward as Science: With Selections From the Critique of Pure Reason (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2004.Kant is the central figure of modern philosophy. He sought to rebuild philosophy from the ground up, and he succeeded in permanently changing its problems and methods. This revised edition of the Prolegomena, which is the best introduction to the theoretical side of his philosophy, presents his thought clearly by paying careful attention to his original language. Also included are selections from the Critique of Pure Reason, which fill out and explicate some of Kant's central arguments, and in w…Read more
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56SeeingDretskePhilosophical Studies 120 (1-3): 19-35. 2004.A commentary on Dretske, "Change Blindness" (same journal issue). Dretske analyzes standard cases of change blindness as properly being difference blindness, since the eye is in saccade when the change occurs and so the change itself (the event of the change) is not seen. He considers two models of the phenomenon, the object model and the fact model, preferring the latter. In previous work, he had affirmed the object model. I reconsider its merits, first looking more closely at the notion of dif…Read more
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28Psychology in Philosophy: Historical PerspectivesIn Sara Heinamaa & Martina Reuter (eds.), Psychology and Philosophy: Inquiries into the Soul from Late Scholasticism to Contemporary Thought, Springer. pp. 1-25. 2009.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
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505Force and Mind–Body InteractionIn Juan Jose Saldana (ed.), Science and Cultural Diversity: Proceedings of the XXIst International Congress of the History of Science, Autonomous National University of Mexico. pp. 3074-3089. 2005.This article calls into question the notion that seventeenth-century authors such as Descartes and Leibniz straightforwardly conceived the mind as something "outside" nature. Descartes indeed did regard matter as distinct from mind, but the question then remains as to whether he equated the natural world, and the world of laws of nature, with the material world. Similarly, Leibniz distinguished a kingdom of final causes (pertaining to souls) and a kingdom of efficient causes (pertaining to bodie…Read more
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45Representation in perception and cognition: Connectionist affordancesIn William Ramsey, Stephen P. Stich & D. Rumelhart (eds.), Philosophy and Connectionist Theory, Lawrence Erlbaum. pp. 163--95. 1991.There is disagreement over the notion of representation in cognitive science. Many investigators equate representations with symbols, that is, with syntactically defined elements in an internal symbol system. In recent years there have been two challenges to this orthodoxy. First, a number of philosophers, including many outside the symbolist orthodoxy, have argued that "representation" should be understood in its classical sense, as denoting a "stands for" relation between representation and re…Read more
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97What Were Kant’s Aims in the Deduction?Philosophical Topics 31 (1-2): 165-198. 2003.This article argues that many (often Anglophone) interpreters of the Deduction have mistakenly identified Kant's aim as vindicating ordinary knowledge of objects and as refuting Hume's (alleged) skepticism about such knowledge. Instead, the article contends that Kant's aims were primarily negative. His primary mission (in the Deduction) was not to justify application of the categories to experience, but to show that any use beyond the domain of experience could not be justified. To do this, he n…Read more
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196Did Descartes have a Jamesian theory of the emotions?Philosophical Psychology 20 (4): 413-440. 2007.Rene Descartes and William James had "body first" theories of the passions or emotions, according to which sensory stimulation causes a bodily response that then causes an emotion. Both held that this bodily response also causes an initial behavioral response (such as flight from a bear) without any cognitive intervention such as an "appraisal" of the object or situation. From here they differ. Descartes proposed that the initial processes that produce fear and running are entirely mechanical. E…Read more
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395Psychology, philosophy, and cognitive science: Reflections on the history and philosophy of experimental psychologyMind and Language 17 (3): 207-232. 2002.This article critically examines the views that psychology first came into existence as a discipline ca. 1879, that philosophy and psychology were estranged in the ensuing decades, that psychology finally became scientific through the influence of logical empiricism, and that it should now disappear in favor of cognitive science and neuroscience. It argues that psychology had a natural philosophical phase (from antiquity) that waxed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that this psycholo…Read more
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39Mechanizing the Sensitive SoulIn Gideon Manning (ed.), Matter and form in early modern science and philosophy, Brill. 2012.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
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257The Passions of the soul and Descartes’s machine psychologyStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 38 (1): 1-35. 2007.Descartes developed an elaborate theory of animal physiology that he used to explain functionally organized, situationally adapted behavior in both human and nonhuman animals. Although he restricted true mentality to the human soul, I argue that he developed a purely mechanistic (or material) ‘psychology’ of sensory, motor, and low-level cognitive functions. In effect, he sought to mechanize the offices of the Aristotelian sensitive soul. He described the basic mechanisms in the Treatise on man,…Read more
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73Attention in Early Scientific PsychologyIn Richard D. Wright (ed.), Visual Attention, Oxford University Press. pp. 3-25. 1998.Attention only "recently"--i.e. in the eighteenth century--achieved chapter status in psychology textbooks in which psychology is conceived as a natural science. This report first sets this entrance, by sketching the historical contexts in which psychology has been considered to be a natural science. It then traces the construction of phenomenological descriptions of attention from antiquity to the seventeenth century, noting various aspects of attention that were marked for discussion by Arist…Read more
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81Phenomenal and Cognitive Factors in Spatial PerceptionIn Gary Hatfield & Sarah Allred (eds.), Visual Experience: Sensation, Cognition, and Constancy, Oxford University Press. pp. 35. 2012.This chapter provides an overview of the phenomenology of size perception and the use of instructions to tease apart phenomenal and cognitive aspects. It develops his own recent proposals concerning the geometry of visual space. The chapter proposes that visual space is contracted along the lines of sight. This contraction would explain the apparent convergence of railway tracks, but without invoking a “proximal mode” experience. Parallel railway tracks receding into the distance project converg…Read more
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566First Philosophy and Natural Philosophy in DescartesIn A. J. Holland (ed.), Philosophy, Its History and Historiography, Reidel. pp. 149-164. 1985.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
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628Spatial 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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141The 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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434Kant on the perception of space (and time)In Paul Guyer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Kant and Modern Philosophy, Cambridge University Press. pp. 61--93. 2006.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 facil…Read more
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698AnimalsIn 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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84Reason, 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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80Helmholtz 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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170Rationalist Roots of Modern PsychologyIn Sarah Robins, John 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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664Psychology 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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29Epilogue: 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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67René DescartesStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2008.This version has been superseded by the one published in Spring, 2014.
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