… on philosophical thinking
Posted in Dim Lit Philosophy, hum 291, WFC on Apr 10th, 2011
Pro-active Explanation and Retrograde Understanding The difference between the natural sciences on the one hand, and, on the other the social sciences and humanities is in their subject matter. Yet, people’s evaluations of the two groups of sciences is based in a difference in methodologies.
Posted in hum 346, Perception on Apr 19th, 2010
Thinking does not seem to require objects (real things, I mean)—all it needs are subject matters. Thinking as such cannot establish whether there is an object out there. Action needs a way to assess objects—it seems perception provides that way, rather than (or next to) thought. If I throw something at you, how do you [...]
Posted in hum 346, Perception on Apr 11th, 2010
My view of perception as farming out to the external objects has a clear advantage over receptive views of perception. When we perceive a chair we not only collect but farm out visual aspects to the chair itself, and not only visual characteristics but tactile audible, etc. ones, too: noticing a chair means attributing “to-be-sat-uponness”—which [...]
Posted in hum 346, Perception on Apr 9th, 2010
In the so-called Ames Room two twins move about and seem to the viewer to grow and shrink as they move. In certain sweet spots they appear of the same size (as in reality they are). The Ames Room is presented in the literature as a problem for theories of perception. Sometimes the effects on [...]
Posted in hum 291 on Mar 7th, 2010
…Whether or not someone addresses another person is between the addresser and the addressee… In class, I posed the question whether or not Lenie Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will is a piece of propaganda, or rather documentary as Riefenstahl herself has claimed. Joseph Goebbels was the minister of propaganda. Propaganda, one could conclude from that, [...]
Posted in Dim Lit Philosophy, hum 346, Perception, Wittgenstein on Dec 10th, 2009
So I hear Douwe Draaisma say–in an interview on television–that we have many kinds of memory, at least one per sense organ and then a lot more of them. (I like that model). And he defines memory as anything we retain from the past to deal with the present. (I like that definition). And he [...]
Posted in Dim Lit Philosophy, Fenomenologie, hum 346, Perception, Photography on Nov 30th, 2009
…Phenomenology is martial art for philosophers… Imagine this: you are the only person in the world who moves in slow motion. You have no clue about this (of course you don’t), but everyone else can see it happening. So imagine a world where people see one person moving in slow motion, and that one person [...]
Posted in Dim Lit Philosophy, hum 346, Perception on Nov 16th, 2009
We perceive a chair as that thing out there, which allows us to sit on it, or to pick it up and move it a bit, etc. It is us who add the practical structuring, but it is the chair which adds the affordances, i.e. the actual or anticipated (or remembered) affordance: things the members [...]
Posted in Dim Lit Philosophy, hum 346, Perception, Wollheim on May 8th, 2009
Recently, I developed this “argument from reunions”: People, when visiting reunions, say, of a High School class, notice how they fall back in their old roles. That is how we express the experience. But why does this happen? According to my view on how we farm out our perceptions to the things and events perceived [...]
Posted in Literature Modules, Literatuurmodulen on Jan 2nd, 2009
On these pages I keep you informed about the literature courses in aesthetics. There are three of them: In “Art and Morality” you study the debate on the possibility of a moral evaluation of art; In “Mind and Art” collections of articles by one author are studied and taken to the task by comparison with [...]
Posted in Dim Lit Philosophy, hum 346, Perception, Photography on Dec 18th, 2008
I simply love Currie’s assumption that the real precedes the represented, but object to his use of it. In Image and Mind, he argues that fictional entities because they are non-existent cannot be represented photographically. “A fiction does not have the kinds of properties—shape, size, colour—that could be represented pictorially.” (p. 12). I have called [...]
Posted in Dim Lit Philosophy, hum 346, Perception on Dec 10th, 2008
Put on a mask and you should find that your expectations will change. You’ll typically expect others to look for clues about who you are, and, when none are found, a hesitancy to communicate with you, perhaps only on instrumental grounds. Did you just tell you’d go shopping for them, then they would typically want [...]
Posted in Dim Lit Philosophy, hum 346, Perception on Oct 6th, 2008
We think perception is reception (of data from the outside world, or impressions), but tell me: How do we know this? Is their an introspective manner for us to establish this fact? How much of what one perceives comes unsuspected? Not much, does it? Much of what we perceive conforms to our expectations. How often [...]
Posted in Film, hum 291, hum 346, Perception, Shoah, WFC on Sep 23rd, 2008
One of the assets of Claude lanzmann’s film Shoah is this that it presents moral witnesses in places that are sure to stir their memories. Lanzmann did not invite them over to the studio for an interview, nor did he visit them in their own homes. The relevant places are either historical sites (the camps; [...]
“But how can he tell what the holocaust was, if he is telling the story of a German who saved 1300 jews, while the overwhelming majority of the jews was not saved? Even when he shows the moment of the deportation to the Cracau ghetto, or the camp officer shooting at the deported, how can he do justice, even then, to the normalcy of the procedure of murder, the machinery of the extermination? It did not go like that for everyone. In Treblinka, or in Auschwitz, the possibility of salvation was inconceivable.” (Lanzmann). … (read on)
Posted in Dim Lit Philosophy, hum 346, Perception on Jun 21st, 2008
The wisdom in the way our parents lived, and the speciesism therein: they might think of other people first as members of this or that family, and then, perhaps, also, as ugly, or beautiful. They would simply assume that since these people had parents, so they would if not soon then eventually find a partner [...]
Posted in Dim Lit Philosophy, God - religie, hum 346, Perception on Jun 10th, 2008
Of course, we don’t have to believe along with the believers that Gods, wizzards and witches are real entities. It’s pretty clear that neither they nor their working can be perceived polymodally, and thus they cannot be proven real—so we can at the least remain agnosticist (no need for militant atheism). Gods, wizzards, and witches, [...]
Posted in Dim Lit Philosophy, hum 346, Perception, Photography, WFC on Apr 15th, 2008
Looking at some of the iconic images that we recognize as such (we don’t seem to have a definition of iconic images) one might want to think that for a person to be in a particular iconic image is for her or him to be a moral witness (following Margalit’s definition thereof). But is that [...]
Posted in Dim Lit Philosophy, Hermeneutiek, hum 346, Perception on Mar 9th, 2008
Kant’s Copernican Revolution is a point well taken: “the” world is a human world: we get from it what we recognise. Yet, his analysis of this, in terms of two forms of intuition and 12 categories of understanding, is a capitulation to logic—reminding one of Plato’s. Plato, among other things, messed up a beautiful myth [...]
Posted in Film, hum 291, Photography, Shoah on Mar 3rd, 2008
Claude Lanzmann argued (a.o.) that the Shoah cannot be represented (photographically, I would want to add). He states this clearly in explaining what he would do had he found documentary footage. Now if something cannot be represented, then surely it can be misrepresented. (Rather, every representation of it would be a misrepresentation.) This leads to [...]