Perception in Augustine’s De Trinitate 11

2020 ◽  
pp. 41-78
Author(s):  
Susan Brower-Toland
Keyword(s):  
Sensory Memory ◽  
Sense Perception ◽  
Ordinary Sense ◽  
Sensory Awareness ◽  
Hybrid State ◽  
De Trinitate ◽  
Sensory State ◽  
Complex Hybrid ◽  
Internal Sense

In this paper, I explore Augustine’s account of sense cognition in book 11 of De Trinitate. His discussion in this context focuses on two types of sensory state—what he calls ‘outer vision’ and ‘inner vision,’ respectively. His analysis of both types of state is designed to show that cognitive acts involving external and internal sense faculties are susceptible of a kind of trinitarian analysis. A common way to read De Trin. 11, is to interpret Augustine’s account of ‘outer’ vision as an analysis of sense perception and his account of ‘inner’ vision as an analysis of occurrent sensory memory and imagination. I argue against such a reading of De Trin. 11. Insofar as we take perception to be a phenomenally conscious mode of sensory awareness, outer vision cannot, I claim, be the equivalent of ordinary sense perception. For, on Augustine’s view, the deliverances of outer vision only reach the threshold of consciousness, when outer vision occurs in conjunction with inner vision. Hence, on my analysis, sense perception turns out to be a complex, hybrid state—one that involves both outer and inner vision. If I am right, acts of sense perception turn out not to be directly susceptible to trinitarian analysis. Even so, the account is interesting and nuanced for all that.

Uninstantiability

Semiotica ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 2016 (208) ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
John Deely
Keyword(s):  
Concept Formation ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Sense Perception ◽  
Animal Knowledge ◽  
Triadic Relation ◽  
Species Specific ◽  
Internal Sense ◽  
Late Modern ◽  
Modern Sense ◽  
Stimulation Of

AbstractJohn Poinsot (1589–1644), aka Joannes a Sancto Thoma, was the first of St Thomas’ followers among the Latins to demonstrate that the origins of animal knowledge in sensation is already – from the first – a matter of the action of signs. This action, “semiosis,” results in the formation of an irreducibly triadic relation apart from which there is no awareness at all on the part of animals. At the level of internal sense, and then again at the level of intellect (the two having in common dependency upon concept-formation in order to interpret the data provided by sensation), Poinsot shows how the concept serves to make objects known only by serving as the foundation for relations which, exactly as those in sensation, exhibit an irreducibly triadic character, with only this difference: that, whereas the triadic relations of sensation are directly founded upon or “provenate from” species impressa (stimulation of sense powers in bodily interaction with the surroundings) determining the external sense powers, the triadic relations of perceptual and intellectual awareness have as their immediate foundations or “sources of provenation” species expressae (“ideas” or concepts) actively formed by the cognitive powers of memory, imagination, estimation, and intellect. Being relations, all of these triadic relations exhibit no direct instantiation as signate matter, and it is this which makes them only indirectly knowable to sense powers. Intellect, by contrast, in being able to know relations precisely in their difference from related objects and things, manifests the species-specific distinctness of human animals in being able to construct and to know and to communicate about objects – beginning with relations – which admit of no direct sensory instantiation. The purpose of this paper is to show how the ability of the human mind to consider objects which admit of no direct instantiation in sense perception is what distinguishes the human being as “semiotic animal” from what the Latins identified as “brute animals,” not because brutes (the “alloanimals,” to use a term from late modern anthropology) are not “rational” in the modern sense of being able creatively to work through problems (indeed they are rational in this sense!), but because human animals are not confined to the consideration of objects as perceptually instantiable.

Living Religion

2019 ◽  
pp. 123-143
Author(s):  
James W. Jones
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Relational Model ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
Sense Perception ◽  
Ordinary Sense ◽  
Religious Knowledge ◽  
Cloud Of Unknowing ◽  
Human Understanding

An embodied approach to human understanding can ground the case for a “spiritual sense” and for understanding religious knowledge as a form of perception, especially if proprioception (and not just ordinary sense perception) is used as an analogue. The long-standing tradition of the existence of a spiritual sense is brought up to date by linking it to various contemporary neuroscientific theories. An embodied-relational model offers several avenues for understanding our capacity to transform and transcend our ordinary awareness. Two classical Christian theological texts on religious experience—the Cloud of Unknowing and Scheiermacher’s The Christian Faith—are also discussed.

ΔΙΑΝΟΙΑ and Plato's Cave

1970 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. G. Tanner
Keyword(s):  
Sense Perception ◽  
Ordinary Sense

In Part I of his paper Cooper gives indisputable evidence regarding Plato's use of the man-made image as a step to the apprehension of a Form under discussion, whether that image be in fact a diagram or a model, or simply a verbal picture, such as his imaginative account of Justice within a community, which we find used to provide us with in Republic 443 c 4 ff. However, Cooper goes on to assure us that the divided-line figure offers us only three types of object: ‘We have three kinds of objects which differ from one another in clearness and esteem, firstly, the Forms, secondly, the objects of ordinary sense-perception, and thirdly, images, shadows and reflections.’ Now the admitted fact that, as he notes, Republic 10 (597 b 5-e 5) gives the same three orders of reality, does not entirely absolve Cooper from all the implications of Plato's decision to divide his line into four parts rather than three; for it is made quite clear in 509 b 6–10 that the Form of the Good, is the source of being as well as of knowledge, so the Line must also classify both.

Metacognitive reports reflect subjective sensory awareness

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Lau
Keyword(s):  
Sensory Awareness

Sensory Awareness as Discovered by Descriptive Experience Sampling

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arva Bensaheb ◽  
Russell Hurlburt
Keyword(s):  
Experience Sampling ◽  
Descriptive Experience Sampling ◽  
Sensory Awareness

A dual-trace model for visual sensory memory.

2016 ◽  
Vol 42 (11) ◽  
pp. 1903-1922 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcus Cappiello ◽  
Weiwei Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Sensory Memory ◽  
Trace Model

Hybrid state-space self-tuning control using dual-rate sampling

1991 ◽  
Vol 138 (1) ◽  
pp. 50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leang S. Shieh ◽  
Xiao M. Zhao ◽  
John W. Sunkel
Keyword(s):  
State Space ◽  
Hybrid State ◽  
Self Tuning

Are We Mad? Intensity and the Problems of Modern Philosophy

2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-215
Author(s):  
Jeffrey A. Bell
Keyword(s):  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Sense Perception ◽  
The Relationship

In this essay Deleuze's concept of intensity is placed into the context of the problem of accounting for the relationship between sense perception and our conceptual categories. By developing the manner in which Kant responds to Hume's critique of metaphysics, this essay shows how Deleuze develops a Humean line of thought whereby the heterogeneous as heterogeneous is embraced rather than, as is done in Kant, being largely held in relationship to an already prior unity.

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