REID ON SINGLE AND DOUBLE VISION: MECHANICS AND MORALS

2008 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
JAMES VAN CLEVE

When we look at a tree, two images of it are formed, one on each of our retinas. Why, then, asks the child or the philosopher, do we not see two trees? 1 Thomas Reid offers an answer to this question in the section of his Inquiry into the Human Mind entitled ‘Of seeing objects single with two eyes’. The principles he invokes in his answer serve at the same time to explain why we do occasionally see objects double. In Part I of this essay, I examine the principles Reid uses to explain single and double vision. This part is mostly an exercise in the history of cognitive science, but it raises questions of interest to philosophers along the way. In Part II, I turn to a hard-core philosophical problem raised by double vision, namely, whether double vision constitutes an objection to the direct realist theory of perception, which was one of Reid's main philosophical purposes to promote.

Author(s):  
Simon Hobbs

This chapter continues the selective history of extreme art cinema instigated in Chapter 3. Focusing predominantly on the releases of Artificial Eye and Tartan Video, the chapter details the re-emergence of extremity in France during the late 1990s and early 2000s, and looks at the paratextual treatment of Gaspar Noé, Catherine Breillat, and Claire Denis. Thereafter, the chapter expands its geographic lens, and examines extreme art production across Europe, with analysis of The Idiots, Man Bites Dog, Tesis, A Hole in my Heart and Dogtooth. The separation of New French Extremity from other forms of European extremity allows the French films’ impact to be appropriately measured. In essence, the chapter argues that the success of the New French Extremity changed paratextual representations of extremism, making them more popular, common and commercially viable. Thereafter, the chapter considers extreme horror narratives such as Martyrs, Frontier[s], and Switchblade Romance, outlining the way they influence and become influenced by paratextual images of extreme art cinema. By adopting this structure, the chapter again exposes the importance of both highbrow and lowbrow taste within the conceptualisation of extreme art cinema.


Dialogue ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 30 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 103-108
Author(s):  
D. D. Todd

Lehrer's “reason for writing this book is that the philosophy of Thomas Reid is widely unread, while the combination of soundness and creativity of his work is unexcelled.” The book contributes to the ongoing Reid revival. Chapter 1 presents an overview of Reid's life and works and the last, Chapter 15, gives Lehrer's appraisal of Reid's philosophy. Chapter 2, “Beyond Impressions and Ideas,” outlines Reid's “refutation of what he called the Ideal System” of impressions and ideas that dominated philosophy from Descartes through Hume, and summarizes Reid's theory of the mind. The remaining chapters conduct the reader through the three books Reid published during his lifetime. There are three chapters covering the Inquiry of the Human Mind (1764), five on the Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785), a chapter comparing Reid on conception and evidence in the Inquiry and the Essays, and three chapters on Essays on the Active Powers of Man (1788). The index is helpful despite occasional references to a page number larger than the number of pages. The bibliography is generally good, although, oddly, Lehrer lists the inaccessible 1937 Latin edition of Reid's important Philosophical Orations and not the English translation published by the Philosophy Research Archives in 1977 and republished by the Journal of the History of Philosophy Monograph Series early in 1989. The text is remarkably free of typographical errors, but on p. 130 Putnam's 1973 article, “Meaning and Reference,” is said to have been published in 1983.


1990 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 425-442 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas J. Griffin

It is well known that Thomas Reid, premier exponent of the Common Sense school of Scottish philosophy, was an ordained and active minister. Less clear is the role played by theology in the deve opment ofthat philosophy as it matured slowly under his pen, particularly in me most prominent of his works, the Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785) and the Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind (1788), works which range widely over the field of human experience and the nature of reality. When philosophy and theology assumed more distinct and separate identities in the generations which succeeded Reid, it became common for critics of the Common Sense school to base their analyses solely on philosophical foundations and to neglect the theological underpinning which is essential to a fuller and clearer grasp of Keid s position. It would be a useful contribution to more than one discipline were Thomas Reid's philosophy linked more closely to the development and extent of his theological thinking. While his philosophical writings are strewn with theological references in the way typical of the eighteenth century, there is more substance in these references than is usually the case, when divines ofthat age wrote philosophy. That they are much more than casual, conventional embellishments becomes apparent from a careful reading of his works.


2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 270-278
Author(s):  
Miguel López-Astorga

Abstract Nowadays, a very important theory, the mental models theory, is demonstrating that it is able to explain most of the results in reasoning experiments reported by the cognitive science literature. However, this has a consequence. The mental models theory is mainly focused on content and meaning, and its theses can lead to reject the idea that syntax plays a role in the human mind and that reasoning is logical. But, in this paper, I try to show that it is possible to accept the basic framework of the mental models theory and, at the same time, to continue to claim that there are syntactic and formal logical processes coherent with the way our mind works. To do that, I argue that, even accepting that the mental models theory describes correctly the processes why certain combinations of possibilities are detected, it can be stated that the relationships between such combinations indicated by the theory are consistent with, for example, the modal axiomatic system K.


The understanding of the human mind and its ability to learn are objects of research in Cognitive Science. The way a person learns is unique, the result of her previous experiences and the development of her mental model. The understanding of how the students produce their mental models can favor the learning of several disciplines, as evidenced in several papers. In this context, this work investigates the combination of mental models used by students within the lecture of Programming in technical education classes. The analysis was based on a test that identifies strengths and weaknesses in the structuring of mental models.


Author(s):  
Cornelia Schöck

The chapter is a first step on the way to classify the earliest Muslim theologians according to their position and role in the history of natural theology and philosophy. It argues that Jahm b. Ṣafwān and Ḍirār b. ʿAmr represent an empiristic theory according to which the sensible reality outside the mind corresponds one-to-one to the perception inside the human mind. God’s creation is by composition of bundles of properties; man’s knowledge is by decomposition of the property bundles into their parts by means of perception. The perceptions of substantial and qualitative change supply the empirical data by which the intuition of God as the cause of all generation, corruption, and change in corporeal things happens. They refuse a principle of form and essence in things as well as natural causes and powers of generation and alteration in the created cosmos.


Author(s):  
David Ephraim

Abstract. A history of complex trauma or exposure to multiple traumatic events of an interpersonal nature, such as abuse, neglect, and/or major attachment disruptions, is unfortunately common in youth referred for psychological assessment. The way these adolescents approach the Rorschach task and thematic contents they provide often reflect how such experiences have deeply affected their personality development. This article proposes a shift in perspective in the interpretation of protocols of adolescents who suffered complex trauma with reference to two aspects: (a) the diagnostic relevance of avoidant or emotionally constricted Rorschach protocols that may otherwise appear of little use, and (b) the importance of danger-related thematic contents reflecting the youth’s sense of threat, harm, and vulnerability. Regarding this last aspect, the article reintroduces the Preoccupation with Danger Index ( DI). Two cases are presented to illustrate the approach.


2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 211-226
Author(s):  
Marina Folescu

Thomas Reid believed that the human mind is well equipped, from infancy, to acquire knowledge of the external world, with all its objects, persons and events. There are three main faculties that are involved in the acquisition of knowledge: (original) perception, memory, and imagination. It is thought that we cannot understand how exactly perception works, unless we have a good grasp on Reid's notion of perceptual conception (i.e., of the conception employed in perception). The present paper argues that the same is true of memory, and it offers an answer to the question: what type of conception does it employ?


Somatechnics ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 250-262 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oron Catts ◽  
Ionat Zurr

The paper discusses and critiques the concept of the single engineering paradigm. This concepts allude to a future in which the control of matter and life, and life as matter, will be achieved by applying engineering principles; through nanotechnology, synthetic biology and, as some suggest, geo-engineering, cognitive engineering and neuro-engineering. We outline some issues in the short history of the field labelled as Synthetic Biology. Furthermore; we examine the way engineers, scientists, designers and artists are positioned and articulating the use of the tools of Synthetic Biology to expose some of the philosophical, ethical and political forces and considerations of today as well as some future scenarios. We suggest that one way to enable the possibilities of alternative frames of thought is to open up the know-how and the access to these technologies to other disciplines, including artistic.


This volume is an interdisciplinary assessment of the relationship between religion and the FBI. We recount the history of the FBI’s engagement with multiple religious communities and with aspects of public or “civic” religion such as morality and respectability. The book presents new research to explain roughly the history of the FBI’s interaction with religion over approximately one century, from the pre-Hoover period to the post-9/11 era. Along the way, the book explores vexed issues that go beyond the particulars of the FBI’s history—the juxtaposition of “religion” and “cult,” the ways in which race can shape the public’s perceptions of religion (and vica versa), the challenges of mediating between a religious orientation and a secular one, and the role and limits of academic scholarship as a way of addressing the differing worldviews of the FBI and some of the religious communities it encounters.


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