•  2577
    Gestalt psychology and the philosophy of mind
    with William Epstein
    Philosophical 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
  •  52
    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
  •  54
    SeeingDretske
    Philosophical 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
  •  63
    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
  •  437
    Force and Mind–Body Interaction
    In 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
  •  37
    Representation in perception and cognition: Connectionist affordances
    In 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
  •  26
    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
  •  185
    Did 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
  •  382
    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
  •  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
  •  89
    What 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
  •  74
    Phenomenal and Cognitive Factors in Spatial Perception
    In 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
  •  517
    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
  •  240
    The Passions of the soul and Descartes’s machine psychology
    Studies 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
  •  62
    Attention in Early Scientific Psychology
    In 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
  •  415
    Kant 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
  •  565
    Animals
    In 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
  •  581
    Spatial Perception and Geometry in Kant and Helmholtz
    PSA: 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
  •  131
    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
  •  73
    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
  •  149
    Rationalist Roots of Modern Psychology
    In 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
  •  77
    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
  •  23
    Epilogue: Advances and open questions
    with William Epstein
    In 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
  •  57
    René Descartes
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2008.
    This version has been superseded by the one published in Spring, 2014.
  •  580
    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
  •  547
    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
  •  1582
    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
  •  49
    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
  •  83
    Visual Experience: Sensation, Cognition, and Constancy (edited book)
    with Sarah Allred
    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