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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