Mark, tomorrow I will try to respond to your request. This document from 1946, does that mean you are my age? I had a course "Perception and Cognition" in 1950 at CUNY (City College then.) But I guess that was before you were in college (if in NYC it may have been Fordum University.) Martin On Dec 6, 2018 3:11 PM, Mark Stahlman <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> 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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