Combining Texts

Ideas for 'Being and Time', 'The World as Will and Idea' and 'Animal Rights and Wrongs'

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5 ideas

12. Knowledge Sources / B. Perception / 1. Perception
Perception (which involves an assessment) is a higher state than sensation [Scruton]
     Full Idea: Perception is a higher state than sensation: it involves not just a response to the outer world, but also an assessment of it.
     From: Roger Scruton (Animal Rights and Wrongs [1996], p.14)
     A reaction: This seems to me a simple but really important distinction, even though it wickedly uses the word 'higher', which Greeks like but post-Humeans struggle with. But we all know it is higher, don't we?
12. Knowledge Sources / B. Perception / 4. Sense Data / a. Sense-data theory
Direct feeling of the senses are merely data; perception of the world comes with understanding causes [Schopenhauer]
     Full Idea: What the eye, the ear, or the hand feels, is not perception, it is merely data. Only when the understanding passes from the effect to the cause does the world lie before us as perception extended in space.
     From: Arthur Schopenhauer (The World as Will and Idea [1819], I 004)
     A reaction: These certainly seems to be a sense-data theory. Philosophers are much more ready to separate the data from the understanding than neuroscientists are.
12. Knowledge Sources / B. Perception / 4. Sense Data / d. Sense-data problems
There are no raw sense-data - our experiences are of the sound or colour of something [Heidegger]
     Full Idea: We always take a noise as the sound of something; we always take a hue as the color of something. We simply do not experience raw, uninterpreted sense-data - these are the inventions of philosophers.
     From: Martin Heidegger (Being and Time [1927], 207/163-4), quoted by Richard Polt - Heidegger: an introduction 3.§31-3
     A reaction: This is something like the modern view of sense-data as promoted by John McDowell, rather than the experiential atoms of Russell and Moore. Experience is holistic, but that doesn't mean we can't analyse it into components.
12. Knowledge Sources / B. Perception / 5. Interpretation
Perceived objects always appear in a context [Heidegger]
     Full Idea: The perceptual 'something' is always in the middle of something else, it always forms part of a 'field'.
     From: Martin Heidegger (Being and Time [1927], p.4), quoted by Kevin Aho - Existentialism: an introduction 3 'Perceptual'
     A reaction: Sounds like our knowledge of electrons. Nice point. Standard analytic discussions of perceiving a glass always treat it in isolation, when it is on an expensive table near a brandy bottle. Or near a hammer.
All perception is intellectual [Schopenhauer]
     Full Idea: All perception is intellectual.
     From: Arthur Schopenhauer (The World as Will and Idea [1819], I 004)
     A reaction: Even in slugs? I suspect that this is a tautology. Schopenhauer will only allow my vision or hearing to become 'perception' when an intellectual element enters into it.