Download or read book Descartes and the Puzzle of Sensory Representation written by Raffaella De Rosa and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2010-01-07 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While much has been written on Descartes' theory of mind and ideas, no systematic study of his theory of sensory representation and misrepresentation is currently available in the literature. Descartes and the Puzzle of Sensory Misrepresentation is an ambitious attempt to fill this gap. It argues against the established view that Cartesian sensations are mere qualia by defending the view that they are representational; it offers a descriptivist-causal account of their representationality that is critical of, and differs from, all other extant accounts (such as, for example, causal, teleofunctional and purely internalist accounts); and it has the advantage of providing an adequate solution to the problem of sensory misrepresentation within Descartes' internalist theory of ideas. In sum, the book offers a novel account of the representationality of Cartesian sensations; provides a panoramic overview, and critical assessment, of the scholarly literature on this issue; and places Descartes' theory of sensation in the central position it deserves among the philosophical and scientific investigations of the workings of the human mind.
Download or read book Descartes Malebranche and the Crisis of Perception written by Walter Ott and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-28 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The seventeenth century witnesses the demise of two core doctrines in the theory of perception: naïve realism about color, sound, and other sensible qualities and the empirical theory, drawn from Alhacen and Roger Bacon, which underwrote it. This created a problem for seventeenth century philosophers: how is that we use qualities such as color, feel, and sound to locate objects in the world, even though these qualities are not real? Ejecting such sensible qualities from the mind-independent world at once makes for a cleaner ontology, since bodies can now be understood in purely geometrical terms, and spawns a variety of fascinating complications for the philosophy of perception. If sensible qualities are not part of the mind-independent world, just what are they, and what role, if any, do they play in our cognitive economy? We seemingly have to use color to visually experience objects. Do we do so by inferring size, shape, and motion from color? Or is it a purely automatic operation, accomplished by divine decree? This volume traces the debate over perceptual experience in early modern France, covering such figures as Antoine Arnauld, Robert Desgabets, and Pierre-Sylvain Régis alongside their better-known countrymen René Descartes and Nicolas Malebranche.
Download or read book Descartes Theory of Sense perception written by and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Descartes s Concept of Mind written by Lilli Alanen and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Descartes's concept of the mind, as distinct from the body with which it forms a union, set the agenda for much of Western philosophy's subsequent reflection on human nature and thought. This is the first book to give an analysis of Descartes's pivotal concept that deals with all the functions of the mind, cognitive as well as volitional, theoretical as well as practical and moral. Focusing on Descartes's view of the mind as intimately united to and intermingled with the body, and exploring its implications for his philosophy of mind and moral psychology, Lilli Alanen argues that the epistemological and methodological consequences of this view have been largely misconstrued in the modern debate. Informed by both the French tradition of Descartes scholarship and recent Anglo-American research, Alanen's book combines historical-contextual analysis with a philosophical problem-oriented approach. It seeks to relate Descartes's views on mind and intentionality both to contemporary debates and to the problems Descartes confronted in their historical context. By drawing out the historical antecedents and the intellectual evolution of Descartes's thinking about the mind, the book shows how his emphasis on the embodiment of the mind has implications far more complex and interesting than the usual dualist account suggests.
Download or read book Active Perception in the History of Philosophy written by José Filipe Silva and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2014-03-18 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The aim of the present work is to show the roots of the conception of perception as an active process, tracing the history of its development from Plato to modern philosophy. The contributors inquire into what activity is taken to mean in different theories, challenging traditional historical accounts of perception that stress the passivity of percipients in coming to know the external world. Special attention is paid to the psychological and physiological mechanisms of perception, rational and non-rational perception and the role of awareness in the perceptual process. Perception has often been conceived as a process in which the passive aspects - such as the reception of sensory stimuli - were stressed and the active ones overlooked. However, during recent decades research in cognitive science and philosophy of mind has emphasized the activity of the subject in the process of sense perception, often associating this activity to the notions of attention and intentionality. Although it is recognized that there are ancient roots to the view that perception is fundamentally active, the history remains largely unexplored. The book is directed to all those interested in contemporary debates in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive psychology who would like to become acquainted with the historical background of active perception, but for historical reliability the aim is to make no compromises.
Download or read book Meditations on First Philosophy written by René Descartes and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Descartes Philosophical Revolution A Reassessment written by H. Ben-Yami and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-05-28 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ben-Yami shows how the technology of Descartes' time shapes his conception of life, soul and mind–body dualism; how Descartes' analytic geometry helps him develop his revolutionary conception of representation without resemblance; and how these ideas combine to shape his new and influential theory of perception.
Download or read book Looking at the Surface of the Mind written by Matthew Christopher McCall and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most defining features of Rene Descartes’ philosophy is the nature and degree of his dualism. As conventional readings go, Descartes neatly divides reality into two radically distinct types of substances—mind and body—and never the two shall meet. I argue, however, that Descartes does not split the mind from body as cleanly as conventional readings might think, that the two metaphysical hemispheres are not entirely separate. There is a bridge linking the two together, and the road map for discovery is found in Descartes’ theory of sensory perception. Descartes’ views on sensory perception is the most apt topic in which to seek an understanding of the relationship between mind and body because, in general, it requires some explanation about how immaterial souls are informed by material bodies; that is, the topic demands that Descartes hypothesize about how perceptions—which he considers exclusive to minds—can be of things wholly distinct in kind, things that are essentially material. Throughout his writings, Descartes pays most attention to visual sensory perception, and so I follow in suit. Moreover, I concentrate on visual shape perception because, as I argue, understanding this aspect of Descartes’ philosophy leads to insights about the precise relationship between mind and body.
Download or read book Ideas as Acts of Perception written by Mark Clive Hulbert and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Discourse on the Method written by René Descartes and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1996-01-01 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Descartes' ideas not only changed the course of Western philosophy but also led to or transformed the fields of metaphysics, epistemology, physics and mathematics, political theory and ethics, psychoanalysis, and literature and the arts. This book reprints Descartes' major works, Discourse on Method and Meditations, and presents essays by leading scholars that explore his contributions in each of those fields and place his ideas in the context of his time and our own. There are chapters by David Weissman on metaphysics and psychoanalysis, John Post on epistemology, Lou Massa on physics and mathematics, William T. Bluhm on politics and ethics, and Thomas Pavel on literature and art. These essays are accompanied by others by David Weissman and by Stephen Toulmin that introduce the idea of intellectual lineages, discuss the period in which Descartes wrote, and reexamine the premises of his philosophy in light of contemporary philosophical, political, and social thinking.
Download or read book The Will to Reason written by C. P. Ragland and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 'Giving Aid Effectively', Mark T. Buntaine argues that countries that are members of international organizations have prompted multilateral development banks to give development and environmental aid more effectively by generating better information about performance.
Download or read book Descartes on Seeing written by Celia Wolf-Devine and published by Southern Illinois University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this first book-length examination of the Cartesian theory of visual perception, Celia Wolf-Devine explores the many philosophical implications of Descartes' theory, concluding that he ultimately failed to provide a completely mechanistic theory of visual perception. Wolf-Devine traces the development of Descartes' thought about visual perception against the backdrop of the transition from Aristotelianism to the new mechanistic science--the major scientific paradigm shift taking place in the seventeenth century. She considers the philosopher's work in terms of its background in Aristotelian and later scholastic thought rather than looking at it "backwards" through the later work of the British empiricists and Kant. Wolf-Devine begins with Descartes' ideas about perception in the Rules and continues through the later scientific writings in which he develops his own mechanistic theory of light, color, and visual spatial perception. Throughout her discussion, she demonstrates both Descartes' continuity with and break from the Aristotelian tradition. Wolf-Devine critically examines Cartesian theory by focusing on the problems that arise from his use of three different models to explain the behavior of light as well as on the ways in which modern science has not confirmed some of Descartes' central hypotheses about vision. She shows that the changes Descartes made in the Aristotelian framework created a new set of problems in the philosophy of perception. While such successors to Descartes as Malebranche, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume accepted the core of his theory of vision, they struggled to clarify the ontological status of colors, to separate what is strictly speaking "given" to the sense of sight from what is the result of judgments by the mind, and to confront a "veil of perception" skepticism that would have been unthinkable within the Aristotelian framework. Wolf-Devine concludes that Descartes was not ultimately successful in providing a completely mechanistic theory of visual perception, and because of this, she suggests both that changes in the conceptual framework of Descartes are in order and that a partial return to some features of the Aristotelian tradition may be necessary.
Download or read book Passions of the Soul written by René Descartes and published by Hackett Publishing. This book was released on 1989-12-15 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: TABLE OF CONTENTS: Translator's Introduction Introduction by Genevieve Rodis-Lewis The Passions of the Soul: Preface PART I: About the Passions in General, and Incidentally about the Entire Nature of Man PART II: About the Number and Order of the Passions, and the Explanation of the Six Primitives PART III: About the Particular Passions Lexicon: Index to Lexicon Bibliography Index Index Locorum
Download or read book Cartesian Truth written by Thomas C. Vinci and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1998 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arguing that science and metaphysics are inseparably linked in Descartes' work, and that one can't be understood without the other, the author offers a reconstruction of central parts of Descartes' metaphysics and theory of perception.
Download or read book Seeing Doing and Knowing written by Mohan Matthen and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book is a philosophical treatment of sense perception and examines the work of cognitive neuroscientists. Its central theme is the task-oriented specialization of sensory systems across the biological domain. This text includes theories of perceptual similarity, content, and realism"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book Perception and Reality written by Ralph Schumacher and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about the nature of sensory perception. Contributions focus on five questions, i.e.: (1) What distinguishes sensory perception from other cognitive states? Is it true, for instance, that perceptual content, in contrast to the phenomenal content of sensations like pain, always depends on the perceivers conceptual resources? (2) How do we have to explain the intentionality of perceptual states? (3) What is the nature of perceptual content? (4) In which sense do the objects of sensory perception depend on the constitution of the perceiver? How, for instance, do secondary qualities like colours, sounds and smells depend on the perception of human subjects? (5) How can we account for the intentionality of misperceptions? These questions are addressed through the interpretation of classical historical texts as well as in the context of systematical reflections. With contributions by Margaret Atherton, Michael Ayers, Peter Baumann, Martha Brandt Bolton, Thomas Grundmann, Gary Hatfield, Rolf-Peter Horstmann, Andreas Kemmerling, Bertram Kienzle, Martine Nida-Rümelin, Dominik Perler, Jay F. Rosenberg, Katia Saporiti, Ralph Schumacher, Gerald Vision, and Russell Wahl.
Download or read book Descartes Meditations written by Karen Detlefsen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides new insights into understanding Descartes' philosophy of mind, especially the role and significance of the senses and emotions.
