Descartes and the Curious Case of the Origin of Sensory Ideas (original) (raw)
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Descartes's Transformation of the Sensory Perceptional Model in Medieval Philosophy
People generally accept the popular interpretation of Descartes' philosophy, which suggests that Descartes not only discovered the principles of optics but also applied them to explain our mechanical and physiological processes of visual perception using his innovative, pure science. Furthermore, his philosophy completely rejected the "species" theory, an intermediary tool in the human brain that aids in our understanding of things, which ancient philosophers and their medieval successors created. This theory was central to intentionality theories in the Middle Ages. He ultimately demonstrated that his new cognitive model consists of pure reason and pure intellectual intuition. This model is solely constructed from the "clearest ideas" directly provided to the human mind through the illumination of Nature's Light to the process of human meditation. This paper aims to correct the oversimplified understanding of the interpretation mentioned above. I will attempt to prove step by step that, in the complex narrative surrounding philosophical truth, Descartes revisited the fundamental and core issue of the human sensory perception mechanism, which implies a new level of understanding. For Descartes, as we all know, the essence of human sensation and perception is also attributed solely to pure reason, significantly separating him from traditional philosophers. However, this distinction is still deeply intertwined with the mind-body identity issues, which have always been central to intentional theories among academic philosophers in the Middle Ages.
Análisis. Revista de Investigación filosófica, Vol. 2, nº 1 (2015): 163-193.
In this essay, I argue that a proper understanding of the Cartesian proof of the external world sheds light on some vexatious questions concerning his theory of sense perception. Three main points emerge from the discussion: a picture of the mind, conceived as the power of understanding, as essentially related to the physical world; an extension of rationality such that it includes a set of necessities that neither can be deduced from the principles furnished by pure understanding alone nor are to be found among the particular items of sense experience; and a conception of human sense perception as a composite power that includes sensory awareness as well as understanding, and so that establishes a sharp distinction between human and animal sensory awareness. As far as agency is a constitutive ingredient of human sense perception, Descartes’ doctrine is in line with some current versions of a virtue epistemology.
In the beginning of the skeptical argumentation of the Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes’s meditator states: “Whatever I have up till now accepted as most true I have acquired either from the senses or through the senses”. However, since the senses are occasionally in error, she concludes that one should not trust them completely. (AT VII, 18; CSM II, 12.) The laid Empirical Principle, though not upheld by Descartes himself, is the starting point of the Cartesian skepticism and along with its preliminary questioning, sets the stage for the famous scenarios of dreaming and deceiver to follow. However, although the later scenarios have garnered much attention in the secondary literature, Descartes’s approach to skepticism based on particular sensory experience has in most readings been almost completely skipped. Part of the reason might be the anticipation to get to the more interesting argumentation. Another part of it might be the abrupt nature by which Descartes seems to treat the scenario. Despite this abruptness, I maintain that Descartes’s treatment of particular sensory skepticism is crucial to his overall argument and for the achievement of the goals in the Meditations. In this paper, I analyze the skeptical scenario of Occasional Sensory Errors or OSE, arguing for its naturality and reasonable nature, while separating it from systematic doubt of the senses. I read OSE as generating a seriously taken skeptical puzzle for the background of Aristotelian theory of cognition and pre-philosophical naïve realism of everyday life, both of which I identify as models for the Empirical Principle in the beginning of the First Meditation. I also argue that the scenario of OSE can be likewise understood from the point of view of the renaissance and early modern skeptical tradition. However, while succeeding as a serious skeptical scenario, I argue that OSE scenario is not enough for Descartes to generally doubt sensory experience and consider that the senses might be systematically in error. In order to succeed in the systematic doubt of the senses by the dreaming doubt, Descartes needs to guide the meditator from the natural common sense attitude, used in practical everyday life, to the unnatural metaphysical doubt, used in the skeptical project of the Meditations. These two should be considered two different states of mind, with the latter being the metaphysical attitude required for the Cartesian suspension of judgment.
The role of Sensory Experience in Descartes' Method
This article seeks to show that the role of experience in Descartes’ philosophy cannot be considered independently of his claims on pure intellectual knowledge. First, as a brief introduction, some passages of Descartes’ works, which highlight the importance of experimentation, will be reviewed. Then, the role of ‘common experience’ and sensation in Cartesian scientific explanation is shown. Finally, an explanation about the relationship between experience and reason will provide a general view on Descartes’ scientific explanation.
Was Descartes right after all?: An affective background for bodily awareness
H. de Preester and M. Tsakiris, The Interoceptive Basis of the Mind: from homeostasis to awareness. Oxford: Oxford University Press., 2018
These last 20 years have seen an explosion of experimental work on interoception. Recent accounts of interoception have highlighted its role for self-awareness, positing it at the core of what is sometimes called the "sentient self " (Craig, 2010), the "proto-self " (Damasio, 1999), the "embodied self " (Seth, 2013), or the "material me" (Tsakiris, 2017). What gives such a privileged status to interoception compared to other sources of information about the body, and is it actually warranted? In this chapter, I shall leave aside the empirical investigation of interoception and more simply return to Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy. 1 Although he is mainly known for his dualism and sometimes even perceived as an enemy of interoception (e.g. Damasio, 1994), one should not forget that he also strongly emphasizes the unity between the body and the self: Nature likewise teaches me by these sensations of pain, hunger, thirst, etc., that I am not only lodged in my body as a pilot in a vessel, but that I am besides so intimately conjoined, and as it were intermixed with it, that my mind and body compose a certain unity. For if this were not the case, I should not feel pain when my body is hurt, seeing I am merely a thinking thing, but should perceive the wound by the understanding alone, just as a pilot perceives by sight when any part of his vessel is damaged; and when my body has need of food or drink, I should have a clear knowledge of this, and not be made aware of it by the confused sensations of hunger and thirst: for, in truth, all these sensations of hunger, thirst, pain, etc., are nothing more than certain confused modes of thinking, arising from the union and apparent fusion of mind and body. (Descartes, 2016 [1641] Meditation VI, p. 56) What is interesting is that Descartes uses the examples of pain, thirst, and hunger to show that we have a unique relationship with our body. Descartes might thus have been the first advocate of the significance of interoception for bodily awareness. In this chapter I shall first explore the many ways one might understand the notion of interoception. I shall then assess its contribution for the awareness of one's body as one's own. 1 See also The Passions of the Soul (1649).
Strange Bedfellows: Physics and Metaphysics in Descartes
In a famous passage in the Sixth Set of Replies, Descartes theorises three grades of sensory knowledge. 1 The first grade is a pure material event that concerns the brain and the nervous system; Descartes specifies that this level of sensation is common to men and animals:
Descartes' s Conception of Mind through the Prism of Imagination: Cartesian Dualism Questioned
Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 2018
The aim of this article is to clarify an aspect of Descartes’s conception of mind that seriously impacts on the standard objections against Cartesian Dualism. By a close reading of Descartes’s writings on imagination, I argue that the capacity to imagine does not inhere as a mode in the mind itself, but only in the embodied mind, that is, a mind that is not united to the body does not possess the faculty to imagine. As a mode considered as a general property, and not as an instance of it, belongs to the essence of the substance, and as imagination (like sensation) arises from the mind-body union, then the problem arises of knowing to what extent a Cartesian embodied mind is separable from the body.