I'm really interested in the philosophy of perception in particular and knowledge in general. I've been told to read Hume and Spinoza. Would you know of any works in particular, and any other writers who address these themes and quandries in general?
>>7516283
> philosophy of perception in particular and knowledge in general.
The big innovations in thinking that became popular due to Hume are largely a result of how he related his general philosophy of perception to his skepticist epistemology. If perception ultimately yields only a sequence of overlapping events, only sense impressions of objects and scenes flowing with countless others always into the past moment, and no sense impression of any necessary connection of causal links by which to rationally account for each perception's relations to other perceptions, and no sense impression of what this "self" is that is doing the sensing and thinking to begin with, I don't know how Hume's brand of skepticism makes way for much ambitious speculating about how the first-person experience of perception and consciousness relates to the body and its sense organs and their surroundings.
Spinoza's Ethics also gives a very generalized overview of how a human's perception relates to their intellect and its knowledge, but generalized for a different reason; he operates at such an abstract level, combining and clashing concepts that are lifted so much from vivid sensory data and easily understandable examples, that he doesn't talk too much about how things outside the body can affect the mind through sensation and perception. In fact, he doesn't truly accept that physical objects in space cause reactions in our thinking minds, because he separates the domain of thinking from that of extension, conceiving them as two parallel but non-interacting domains, among an infinity of others that humans have no knowledge of. Spinoza's epistemology is significantly more reliant on rational argumentation for what it counts as "knowledge" compared to its skanter reliance on sensory perception and induction.
>>7516453
So, would you say that Spinoza's thesis is that each man is an island to his own perception, whereas Hume suggests that the world hurtles past each person rather than the other way around?
>>7516283
Locke and Berkely
Nietzsche's essay "On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense."
>>7516283
Among their other writers in the modern west, Berkeley wrote his Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision which, I've read, gives more attention to the issue of how our experience of the objects that make up our perceptions relates to our field of vision and the apparent distances of those objects within it.
Berkeley's philosophy has strong idealist tendencies, and his standpoint on space and spatially extended beings that reduced them to nothing but the sensations of the perceiving subject's mind. It's the English cousin of Leibniz' rationalistic idealism, which explains space and time as the order between disparate perceived objects and scenes, rather than believing that space and time would exist on their own without sensory objects occupying them, or without thinking minds to act as subjects of experience using them. Leibniz' Discourse on Metaphysics and his correspondence with Clarke put this forward pretty well.
It was this second tradition of idealist-tending, subject-centered philosophies of perception that directly influenced Kant. From it he developed a deeply expansive and intricately technical physical system within which perception is basically equivalent to knowledge - an epistemology that advertised, against skepticism, a rational defense of having complete trust that predictable laws of nature, mathematics, and logic (and, separately, ethics), and one that recognized the crucial importance of accounting for the presence of objects - including the subject's own body - in external space. But the other side of this alluring account of the trustworthiness of human knowledge is that it requires the subject's own mind to do most of the work that common sense tells us the perceived object does; Kan't bizarre and revolutionary contention is that the objects your eyes see and your hands touch and are there alongside of your brain and head in external space are real, but also that space (and time) itself along with everything in it are only Being-as-it-appears-to-human-subjects, not Being-in-itself. When we sense sweet smells, or feel physical (and even psychological) pain, or perceive objects out in nature or our own pupils in the mirror, there are sensory images and textures and disparate perceptive data spread out across vast space and time that are ordered together coherently by a more fundamental, knowING-thus-not-knowABLE thinking self.
>>7516283
>>7516622
Schopenhauer is known for preserving most of Kant's theoretical machinery, but is especially relevant to your interest for writing On Vision and Colors early in his career. Despite being a staunch Kantian regarding the ideality of space and time rather than their reality as things-in-themselves, Schopenhauer puts forward a model of how reflected light in external space passes through the pupil, how this stimulates the retina into a physical activity that the brain registers as a spectrum of colors, how the understanding brain reorients the resulting image from the inverted original produced by the eye's lens, how the two eyes cooperate in producing spatial perception and depth of field; also how, supposedly, mere sensory feelings of irritation on your palm would be unintelligible - and could thus never be experienced as a rope sliding through your closed hand - without your mind already having space and time and causality like a pre-programmed ordering formula to impose coherence on those sensations; and other penetrating, if sometimes outdated, pieces of specific everyday evidence in support of his broader philosophy of perception.
Start with Theaetetus
>>7516459
> each man is an island to his own perception
I'm not really sure what that would mean, but human minds don't seem unusually isolated from one another in Spinoza's system. For him, the happenings within each person's mind are private to that person, but this is pretty typical among philosophers (not counting here claims made by thinkers who believe in a non-human mind, like that of a god, that can have direct access to our thoughts).
> Hume suggests that the world hurtles past each person rather than the other way around?
Hume would say that when it comes to what our faculty of reason can strictly prove, we do not know if there really exists an external world separate from our sense impressions, nor do we know if or how such a separate physical world could cause us to receive sense impressions of it, nor do we have any sense data about what our self is that seems to be doing this very sensing that we're conscious of; in this sense, the world hurtles past the perceiving subject without us knowing more about this subject how it might interact with things separate from it - like theater actors and scenes moving around on a stage, without a clear connection to any audience.
But when it comes to what humans instinctively believe, Hume says we all have unshakeable assumptions about the reality of causal connections, and about the existence of the external world as non-illusory, and that since these beliefs are proper and indispensible for navigating everyday life, nature didn't trust them to our faculty of reason and its frailties. Nature instead endowed humans with a separate, non-rational faculty that guides our behavior and supports those commonsense beliefs. So probably in this sense, Hume would be relieved to agree that each physically embodied person passes through the world just as really as the world subjectively passes before each perceiving consciousness.
>>7516622
> intricately technical *philosophical system
>>7517697
> He means solipsism
Probably, but it's not clear to me why Spinoza's system would seem more solipsistic than Hume's or others.
Thank you, everyone!
