Table of contents for Issue 30 - No.4/2020 in New Philosopher

People with synaesthesia experience a “blending” of their senses when they see, smell, taste, touch or hear. Such people have specially wired brains. As a result, when something triggers one of the five senses, another sense also responds. This blending can cause people to see sound, smell colours or taste shapes. In humans, olfaction has a small contribution in identifying objects or other people, but plays an important social and emotional part. People learn to love or to hate certain foods or objects only by appreciating their odour and this proved to be a very important economic factor. Peripheral vision is extremely low-resolution and most of the colour receptors are only at the centre. We don’t notice this because as soon as you wonder about the blurry periphery, your eye…

On September 25, 1690, the first colonial newspaper in America, Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick, was published. Although some English newspapers and single-page broadsides had been available to read before, this was the first true multi-page colonial newspaper. It was suppressed after its first edition: the British governor forced publisher Benjamin Harris and printer Richard Pierce to close down the newspaper for “reflections of a very high nature” and for failing to obtain a correct printing license. Harris hoped to publish the Boston newspaper every month, but his September 25th edition remained the only issue printed. [Source: Poynter] 85% of Americans whose main source of election news is Fox News say that “a lot” (42%) or “some” (43%) of news about the 2020 presidential election seemed completely made up.…

“I am, as a sensing subject, full of natural powers of which I am the first to be filled with wonder. Thus I am not, to recall Hegel’s phrase, a ‘hole in being,’ but rather a hollow, or a fold that was made and that can be unmade.” “I live in the facial expressions of the other, as I feel him living in mine.” “If I wanted to express perceptual experience with precision, I would have to say that one perceives in me, and not that I perceive. Every sensation includes a seed of dream or depersonalisation, as we experience through this sort of stupor into which it puts us when we truly live at the level of sensation.” “Our perception ends in objects, and the object, once constituted, appears…

In The Gutenberg Galaxy, a revisionist tour de force that gave us the axiom “the medium is the message”, Marshall McLuhan argued that moveable type was the prime culprit in shaping a culture enslaved by the tyranny of the visual. Marks on the printed page possessed a visual logic, he explained, in being not just indelible, but replicable, legible, homogeneous. Rising above the contingencies and subjectivities associated with perspective, that is, point of view, they insist that ocular information is paramount, or that seeing is believing. It’s a powerful argument. And it appears, at first blush, to apply equally to the development of scientific knowledge, which, simply put, tests its claims to veracity against the inarguable evidence of observable phenomena. But one does not need to look very far to…

TRUTH is within ourselves; it takes no riseFrom outward things, whate’er you may believe. There is an inmost centre in us all,Where truth abides in fullness; and around,Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in,This perfect, clear perception—which is truth. A baffling and perverting carnal meshBinds it, and makes all error: and, to KNOW,Rather consists in opening out a wayWhence the imprisoned splendour may escape,Than in effecting entry for a lightSupposed to be without.…

Symbols and images The categories of Image, Word, Orientation and Action constitute the main divisions of the Warburg Institute Library and encapsulate its aim: to study the tenacity of symbols and images in European art and architecture (Image, 1st floor); the persistence of motifs and forms in Western languages and literatures (Word, 2nd floor); the gradual transition, in Western thought, from magical beliefs to religion, science and philosophy (Orientation, 3rd & 4th floor) and the survival and transformation of ancient patterns in social customs and political institutions warburg.sas.ac.uk/about-us/ historywarburg-institute Devil’s dictionary IMPARTIAL, adj. Unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy or adopting either of two conflicting opinions. Confusion reigns In a sense, the reason that we perceive matter as extended is that…

newphilosopher.com is an online portal for exploring philosophical ideas on ways to live a more fulfilling life. Read the articles, join in discussions, and watch free online documentaries. Does purpose make you happy? Now more than ever I want to cling to the idea that finding happiness bears some connection to purpose, or even duty. newphilosopher.com/articles/does-having-a-purpose-in-life-make-us-happy/ On purpose In my book, I develop and defend what I believe is the most promising, humane, and justified alternative: the public health-quarantine model. newphilosopher.com/articles/on-purpose/ New Philosopher online store Visit the online store for previous issues of New Philosopher magazine, subscriptions as well as gift ideas. newphilosopher.com/products-page/magazines/ 13 questions Your favourite word? “Mudita” (Sanskrit): the experience of joy – the opposite of resentment and schadenfreude – on hearing of someone else’s good fortune.…

One night earlier this year, I woke to see an elderly man in our bedroom. My partner and I had fled the deaths racking up during the coronavirus outbreak in New York to the relative safety of the countryside, where his family has a creaky, tumbledown home built in the 1890s. When I saw the man – slim, with a white beard, white hair and sad, inquiring eyes – I sat bolt upright and shook my partner. “Who is that?” I whispered. Half-awake, he rose on his elbows and turned to look. “That?” he replied. “That’s me when I’m old.” Then he promptly fell back asleep. In the morning he had no recollection of our conversation. It wasn’t the first time I had seen ghostly figures. A few years ago,…

Think of the outline of Australia as it appears on a map. Visualise it. What do you see? Recently someone posted an image of this outline on social media showing how it can be seen as a dog’s head (perhaps a Scottish terrier) facing left, joined to a (Siamese?) cat’s head looking right, leaning down to eat the morsel of food that is Tasmania. This went viral. Once you see that image, it’s hard to forget it – the map looks different. Suddenly you see it as a combination of two animal heads, and it is a whole lot easier to remember the way the northern coastline goes into a cat’s ear peninsula, and the relation between the south coast and Tasmania. It’s difficult to revert to seeing the coastline…

I was reading a picture book with my daughter when she said, “Look, the Snow Queen is bigger now.”Surprised, I answered – “Oh, she’s not smaller there, just further away.” My daughter looked at me like I’d lost my mind. Why had I said that the Snow Queen was further away when she patently wasn’t – when she remained an arm’s length away, still on the page? My jumbled explanations made me realise that I had been taking for granted the capacity for seeing perspective on a two-dimensional page. But linear perspective is no more than a convention, and for it to be understood requires training your vision to recognise and make sense of the convention. Specifically, it requires that you imagine yourself occupying a fixed point-of-view, from which the…

noun: 1 The ability to see, hear, or become aware of something through the senses. 2. Awareness of something through the senses. 3. The neurophysiological processes, including memory, by which an organism becomes aware of and interprets external stimuli. 4. The way in which something is regarded, understood, or interpreted. 5. Intuitive understanding and insight. Origin:  Late Middle English from Latinperceptio(n-), from the verbpercipere‘seize, understand’.…

IT IS IN THE EMPIRICIST development, as we know, that the new psychology, which was required as a correlate to pure natural science when the latter was separated off, is brought to its first concrete execution. Thus it is concerned with investigations of introspective psychology in the field of the soul, which has now been separated from the body, as well as with physiological and psychophysical explanations. On the other hand, this psychology is of service to a theory of knowledge which, compared with the Cartesian one, is completely new and very differently worked out. In Locke’s great work this is the actual intent from the start. It offers itself as a new attempt to accomplish precisely what Descartes’s Meditations intended to accomplish: an epistemological grounding of the objectivity of…

Louise Antony is Professor of Philosophy at University of Massachusetts Amherst. She studied philosophy at Syracuse University and the University of London, and received her PhD from Harvard University. With Norbert Horn-stein, she co-edited Chomsky and His Critics. Antony is interested in naturalistic epistemology, and is currently trying to develop a psychologically realistic account of empirical justification. She also works in feminist philosophy, coediting with Charlotte Witt A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity.Antony has been a guest on the radio show Philosophy Talk, and has contributed to The New York Times. She was recently elected Vice-President of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, and has served as President of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology. Zan Boag: I’d like to delve into your…

What is your demon? Self-loathing, depression, and anxiety are the first things that spring to mind. Which “thinker” has had the greatest influence on your life? Harold Pinter: few people have perfectly expressed how I felt growing up in Vegas. What do you doubt most? The efficacy of my will power. If you could change one thing about the world, what would that be? I would wash away all ideological influences of the Roman Empire. What does it mean to be human? To eventually be at peace with being in a body. What illusion do you suffer from? Low self-image. What would you never do, no matter the price? Murther. If you could choose, what would you have for your last meal? Chicken Parmigiana from Boston House of Pizza, the…

Susanna Siegel Susanna Siegel is Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. Siegel currently works on topics in the philosophy of mind and epistemology and has written two books: The Contents of Visual Experience (2010), and The Rationality of Perception (2017). Siegel is past President, American Society for the Scientific Study of Consciousness; and upcoming President, Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology. Nigel Warburton Nigel Warburton is a freelance philosopher, podcaster, writer, and the Editor-at-large of New Philosopher. Described as “one of the most-read popular philosophers of our time”, his books include A Little History of Philosophy, Thinking from A to Z, and Philosophy: The Classics. The interviewer for the Philosophy Bites podcast, which has been downloaded over 20 million times, Warburton is one of the founding faculty of…

After reading moral philosophy for a while, you may come to suspect that being a moral philosopher must be utterly exhausting. Not just because reading and writing philosophy is hard work, but because it seems that even in their downtime philosophers are constantly having to perform complex feats of ethical calculation. Even worse, it seems that philosophers think life is like this for everyone else too – as if we’re forever running into decisions that demand we stop and compare our options against whichever moral principles we reflectively endorse. Only then, after performing these painstaking computations of right and wrong, duty and utility, can we act. It’s tiring just thinking about it. The 20th century British philosopher Stephen Toulmin imagines a mundane scenario in which he has borrowed his friend’s…

It might not be fashionable to say this, but philosophers are in the business of finding the truth. Jesting Pilate, of course, scoffed, “What is truth?”, much to his chagrin. Bertrand Russell defined the philosopher’s quest as the asking of questions, the thrill of the hunt for answers; as for actually getting an answer, well, that was less fun. I once was friends with a brilliant and well known but now departed American philosopher who, when I asked him what philosophy meant for him, replied that philosophy was a series of crossword puzzles. If you were good or lucky enough to solve one, you threw away the newspaper and went to the next puzzle. It was all about the puzzling, not the solving. I say, a little shamefully, that I…

When I was young, I was fascinated by an optical illusion that you’ve probably encountered yourself: a diagram in which two identical parallel lines are made to appear different lengths by the addition of two short arrow-like fins at each of their ends, pointing inwards in the case of one line and outwards in the case of the other. What was fascinating was the persistence of the illusion in the face of decisive knowledge that it wasn’t real. The error I made when I first saw the diagram – that I was looking at two lines of different lengths – was swiftly and easily corrected. But my sensory perception of what I was looking at wasn’t so easily swayed; and this was at once strange and marvellous. Even though I…

“THERE ARE NO FACTS, ONLY INTERPRETATIONS.”Friedrich Nietzsche “In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” — Desiderius Erasmus “We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.” — Anaïs Nin “Vision is the Art of seeing Things invisible.” — Jonathan Swift ““I live in the facial expressions of the other, as I feel him living in mine.” — Maurice Merleau-Ponty “All our knowledge has its origin in our perceptions.” — Leonardo da Vinci “The artist is a person who is expert in the training of perception.” — Marshall McLuhan ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” — Charles Dickens “Intellect is not only more perfect than sense but is also, after perfection itself, in the highest degree…

Susanna Siegel is Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. She currently works on topics in the philosophy of mind and epistemology. Her books The Contents of Visual Experience and The Rationality of Perception were published by Oxford University Press. Other publications include “Rich or Thin?”, a debate with Alex Byrne about the contents of perception in Contemporary Debates in the Philosophy of Perception; “The Epistemology of Selection Effects”, in Oxford Studies in Epistemology; and “Cognitive Penetrability: Modularity, Epistemology, and Ethics” with Zoe Jenkin, in Review of Psychology and Philosophy. She is past President, American Society for the Scientific Study of Consciousness; and upcoming President, Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology. In 2018 she gave the Saul Kripke Lecture, CUNY Graduate Center, and in 2020 she delivered the Jack…

The Critic Marcel Proust 1871 – 1922 An intellectual process Even the simple act which we describe as ‘seeing someone we know’ is, to some extent, an intellectual process. We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him which we compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place. In the end they come to fill out so completely the curve of his cheeks, to follow so exactly the line of his nose, they blend so harmoniously in the sound of his voice that these seem to be no more than a transparent envelope, so that each time we see the face or hear the voice it is our own…

Phenomenology of Perception Maurice Merleau-Ponty Appear absurd We said earlier that it is the body which “understands” in the acquisition of habituality.This way of putting it will appear absurd, if understanding is subsuming a sense datum under an idea, and if the body is an object. But the phenomenon of habituality is just what prompts us to revise our notion of “understand” and our notion of the body. To understand is to experience harmony between what we aim at and what is given, between the intention and the performance – and the body is our anchorage in the world. Typecasting Stuart & Elizabeth Ewan Visual perception Alhazen, whose work was translated into Latin in 1270 as Opticae thesaurus, offered a battery of insights into the nature of vision, exploring the…