2 - Perception as presence
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2009
Summary
In the preceding chapter, an argument was advanced against a representational theory of perception. That argument called into question the contrast such a theory makes between an object of perception as the origin of a causal process outside the organism and that object as the content of an episode in our mental lives. It thus suggests that the commonsense view of perception – the view that has to be revised when the representational theory is espoused – may have been right after all in its claim that it is objects in the world that we see and touch and not, as the representational theory would have it, their mental proxies. Of course, what has been said on this point thus far falls well short of a satisfactory statement and defense of a nonrepresentational theory of perception. Accordingly, an attempt will be made in this chapter to sketch in the main lines of such a theory.
In proceeding in this way, I am following a strategy that is itself dictated by a surmise about the fundamental importance of perception as the primordial form of presence for any constructive philosophy of mind or, as I should now say, any theory of human being. This view of perception does not appear to have been shared by many philosophers in recent years, and the prevalent assumption that the primary concern of philosophy is with language has encouraged the view that perception is a topic that belongs principally to psychology.
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- What is a Human Being?A Heideggerian View, pp. 46 - 86Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995