UOW Philosophy Seminar Series. All welcome. Speaker: Dr. Katsunori Miyahara (JSPS, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Research Fellow, Rikkyo University)
Title: Thing-perception and the Cartesian anxiety: An enactive-phenomenological account of seeing things Abstract: The aim of this talk is to explore an enactive account of a type of perceptual experience I call thing-perception with a special focus on the problem of the Cartesian anxiety. Enactivists generally conceive of cognition including perception as embodied action (Varela, Thompson and Rosch 1991, 172-3). One of the central motivations underlying this view is the problem of the Cartesian anxiety, a philosophical worry concerning the notion of a mind-independent world (ibid., 140-5). While the original enactive account of perception almost exclusively focused on action-oriented forms of perceptual experience, at times, our perceptual experience allows us to encounter things in their own terms and to form judgments about them. I call this cognition-oriented type of perceptual experience thing-perception. Then can we also think of thing-perception as a form of embodied action? The enactive/sensorimotor approach to perception, proposed by theorists such as Alva Noë, can be read as containing an enactive account of thing-perception, but in fact it is in danger of reintroducing the Cartesian anxiety. This suggests that we are lacking a truly enactive account of thing-perception. I will attempt to cure this situation by sketching an alternative account, taking inspiration from the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, and calling it the enactive-phenomenological account of thing-perception. When: Monday 7 March Time: 3:30 – 5:00pm Where: 19.2072 (Research Hub ) Contact: Michael Kirchhoff ([email protected]) Best, *Dr. Michael D. Kirchhoff * Lecturer in Philosophy School of Humanities and Social Enquiry Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts University of Wollongong NSW 2522 Australia
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