Download Free Space Perception And The Philosophy Of Science Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Space Perception And The Philosophy Of Science and write the review.

Drawing on the phenomenological tradition in the philosophy of science and philosophy of nature, Patrick Heelan concludes that perception is a cognitive, world-building act, and is therefore never absolute or finished.
Drawing on the phenomenological tradition in the philosophy of science and philosophy of nature, Patrick Heelan concludes that perception is a cognitive, world-building act, and is therefore never absolute or finished.
This collection of essays brings together research on sense modalities in general and spatial perception in particular in a systematic and interdisciplinary way. It updates a long-standing philosophical fascination with this topic by incorporating theoretical and empirical research from cognitive science, neuroscience, and psychology. The book is divided thematically to cover a wide range of established and emerging issues. Part I covers notions of objectivity and subjectivity in spatial perception and thinking. Part II focuses on the canonical distal senses, such as vision and audition. Part III concerns the chemical senses, including olfaction and gustation. Part IV discusses bodily awareness, peripersonal space, and touch. Finally, the volume concludes with Part V on multimodality. Spatial Senses is an important contribution to the scholarly literature on the philosophy of perception that takes into account important advances in the sciences.
Gary Hatfield examines theories of spatial perception from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century and provides a detailed analysis of the works of Kant and Helmholtz, who adopted opposing stances on whether central questions about spatial perception were amenable to natural-scientific treatment. At stake were the proper understanding of the relationships among sensation, perception, and experience, and the proper methodological framework for investigating the mental activities of judgment, understanding, and reason issues which remain at the core of philosophical psychology and cognitive science. Hatfield presents these important issues as living philosophies of science that shape and are shaped by actual research programs, creating a complex and fascinating picture of the entire nineteenth-century battle between nativism and empiricism. His examination of Helmholtz's work in physiological optics and epistemology is a tour de force. Gary Hatfield is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania.
A clear, penetrating exposition of developments in physical science and mathematics brought about by non-Euclidean geometries, including in-depth coverage of the foundations of geometry, theory of time, other topics.
An argument that there are perceptual mechanisms that retrieve information in cognitively and conceptually unmediated ways and that this sheds light on various philosophical issues. In Cognition and Perception, Athanassios Raftopoulos discusses the cognitive penetrability of perception and claims that there is a part of visual processes (which he calls “perception”) that results in representational states with nonconceptual content; that is, a part that retrieves information from visual scenes in conceptually unmediated, “bottom-up,” theory-neutral ways. Raftopoulos applies this insight to problems in philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, and epistemology, and examines how we access the external world through our perception as well as what we can know of that world. To show that there is a theory-neutral part of existence, Raftopoulos turns to cognitive science and argues that there is substantial scientific evidence. He then claims that perception induces representational states with nonconceptual content and examines the nature of the nonconceptual content. The nonconceptual information retrieved, he argues, does not allow the identification or recognition of an object but only its individuation as a discrete persistent object with certain spatiotemporal properties and other features. Object individuation, however, suffices to determine the referents of perceptual demonstratives. Raftopoulos defends his account in the context of current discussions on the issue of the theory-ladenness of perception (namely the Fodor-Churchland debate), and then discusses the repercussions of his thesis for problems in the philosophy of science. Finally, Raftopoulos claims that there is a minimal form of realism that is defensible. This minimal realism holds that objects, their spatiotemporal properties, and such features as shape, orientation, and motion are real, mind-independent properties in the world.
This book explores the notions of space and extension of major early modern empiricist philosophers, especially Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Condillac. While space is a central and challenging issue for early modern empiricists, literature on this topic is sparse. This collection shows the diversity and problematic unity of empiricist views of space. Despite their common attention to the content of sensorial experience and to the analytical method, empiricist theories of space vary widely both in the way of approaching the issue and in the result of their investigation. However, by recasting the questions and examining the conceptual shifts, we see the emergence of a programmatic core, common to what the authors discuss. The introductory chapter describes this variety and its common core. The other contributions provide more specific perspectives on the issue of space within the philosophical literature. This book offers a unique overview of the early modern understanding of these issues, of interest to historians of early modern philosophy, historians and philosophers of science, historians of ideas, and all readers who want to expand their knowledge of the empiricist tradition.
A renewed interest in the study of vision has attracted scholars from such diverse fields as neuroscience, computer science, mathematics, physics and philosophy. At the same time, the development of imaging devices and popularization of stereoscopic effects has increased student interest in vision. This primer provides an overview of the principles of space perception in a handbook format that should appeal to researchers as well as students. Topics covered include geometrical and distal-proximal relationships, spatial localization, stereopsis, cyclopean perception, stimulus inadequacy, pictorial cues, perceived size and shape, Gibsonian psychophysics, lateral motion, motion in depth, perceived object motion, and motion detection.
This book reconsiders the major current topics in the philosophy of perception using olfaction as the paradigm sense. The author reveals how many of the most basic concepts of philosophy of perception are based on peculiarities of visual perception not found in other modalities, and addresses how different the philosophy of perception would be if based on olfaction. The book addresses several aspects of olfaction, including perceptual qualities, percepts, olfaction and cognitive processes, and consciousness. The first part of the book considers perception with respect to its ability to guide behaviors and to make information available to cognitive processes. The author continues by addressing the differences between conscious and non-conscious olfactory perception, and presents an argument for an important role of attention in conscious processes. The book concludes by discussing the function of conscious brain processes and their link to guiding behaviors in complex situations.