ToKers:

I'm on this list to study perception.  Perception is a topic that, it  
would seem, few psychologists understand -- typically confusing it  
with the five "external senses" and often merely assigning it the role  
as cognitive "input."  But it's so much more.  This is the locus of  
where our "behaviors and attitudes" gets shaped by our  
psycho-technological environment.

I'm also an Aristotelian, not a Platonist.  So, even though I've  
studied the area for 20+ years, including attending the "big one," the  
2nd "Towards a Science of Consciousness" conference in Tucson in 1996  
(where I met Dan Dennett, Dave Chalmers, John Searle &al) and I was  
Julian "Origins of Consciousness" Jaynes last student (1920-97, mentor  
to Merlin Donald &al), I have little interest in "consciousness."

Please find attached an amazing document from 1946.  My guess is that  
very few alive today have read it or even know it exists.  It was  
published in the Thomist journal "The Modern Schoolman: A Quarterly  
Journal of Philosophy" from St. Louis University, a Jesuit college  
where Marshall McLuhan once taught (and finished writing his PhD "The  
Classical Trivium.")

It begins by saying (which could just as well be said today, thus the  
efforts at my Center) --

"THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY has always "paid honor"—to use
Maritain's phrase—both to sense knowledge and to the material
world. [Based as it was Aristotle's "sense realism."]

"Thomism, in common with Platonism, maintains the essential difference
between sense and intellect; but it also insists, as against
every philosophy of Platonic inspiration, on the intelligibility of
material things and on the dependence of human intellect, precisely
as human intellect, upon sense data. Problems of sensation and
sense knowledge are therefore of capital importance in Thomistic
philosophy; indeed they involve crucial issues for any Christian and
realistic philosophy. Yet, apparently Neo-Thomism has devoted to
these problems neither the extensive research nor the speculative
energy that it has given, for example, to the theory of analogy and
to the study of intellectual operations. The elaboration of a precise
and purified theory of sensation appears to be one of the great tasks
facing Thomists today. This elaboration is necessary not only for
the proper health and intrinsic development of Thomism itself but
for the Thomistic critique of modern philosophy and science. Mari¬
tain writes:

"The true philosophy of nature pays honour to the mystery of sense perception,
and is aware that it only takes place because the boundless cosmos
is activated by the First Cause whose motion traverses all physical activities
so as to make them produce, at the extreme border where matter
awakens to *esse spirituale*, an effect of knowledge on an animated organ.
. . . It is instructive here to observe that the rebirth of the philosophy
of nature in Germany in our time due to the phenomenological movement,
goes, in the case of Mme. Hedwig Conrad-Martius, for instance,
and of Plessner and Friedmann, along with a vast effort to rehabilitate
sense knowledge. . . . In my eyes [the] existence [of this effort] bears
witness to a fundamental and intrinsic need of need of natural  
philosophy, which
is too frequently neglected by modern scholastics.

"These considerations led THE MODERN SCHOOLMAN to canvass
the opinions of a number of leading American Scholastic philosophers
on this point. Their replies indicated a substantial agreement
that this problem has been, in general, neglected and treated,
sometimes, in a cavalier fashion. THE MODERN SCHOOLMAN,
thereupon, with the hope of encouraging constructive discussion and
research, requested Professor Yves Simon to prepare an outline of
the problems involved and of the order in which they should be
studied. We here present Professor Simon's paper together with
comments by Father Peghaire. Further discussion by our readers is
invited."

I invite you to read the rest, if the philosophical implications of  
*perception* interest you . . . !!

Mark



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