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 ############################ To unsubscribe from the TOK-SOCIETY-L list: write to: mailto:[log in to unmask] or click the following link: http://listserv.jmu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=TOK-SOCIETY-L&A=1