Philosophy

Events

Berkeley and Reid on Acquired Perception by Rebecca Copenhaver (Lewis & Clark College)

Date: February 26 2010, 3:30am Location: John R. Howard Hall 202

A common view in psychology and philosophy holds that strictly speaking we see very little – strictly speaking, we see only facing surface features like color, boundaries and illumination.  Everything else is filled in by the mind.  For example, we don’t have visual experiences of three-dimensional tomatoes.  Rather we have visual experiences of a two-dimensional field colored and illuminated a certain way.  I think that this view is wrong, but surprisingly persistent.  I will dragoon two historical figures, George Berkeley and Thomas Reid, to do my arguing for me, and to illustrate how this putatively common sense view is a piece of theory and a product of history.

THIS EVEN IS FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.