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2 results

  • 18 - Instruments and the Senses

  • from Part III - Problems and Controversies
  • Edited by David Marshall Miller, Iowa State University, Dana Jalobeanu
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Philosophy of the Scientific Revolution
    Published online:
    14 January 2022
    Print publication:
    06 January 2022, pp 331-349

  • Summary

    The discovery and implementation of telescopy and microscopy extended the power of the senses, with often surprising results. The discoveries made with these instruments challenged existing theories of nature, while simultaneously demanding new theories to account for their operation, especially of vision. Moreover, early modern epistemology had to accommodate experiential evidence made by these “artificial” means. The chapter also address advances in the literature since the twenty-year-old classic, The Invisible World by Catherine Wilson.

  • Bibliography

  • Edited by Karen Detlefsen, University of Pennsylvania
  • Book:
    Descartes' Meditations
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    25 March 2012, pp 243-254

  • Summary

    This chapter considers Descartes' systematic doctrines on the nature of the mind and its ideas. It combines Descartes' statements on sensation and perception for hints about how to apply such principles. Outside the Meditations and Principles, Descartes discusses the anatomy, physiology, and mental operation of the senses in the Dioptrics and Passions. Descartes further develops the notion of ideas as images by explaining that differences in the objective reality of ideas amount to differences in what those ideas represent. The author favors an interpretation in which, for Descartes, all sensory ideas represent by resemblance, different kinds of sensory ideas vary in cognitive value, externalization arises through spatial localization, and, with sensory ideas of color and the like, as materially false they do not intrinsically misrepresent but afford occasion for false judgments, which arise as merely apparent, and so not actually legitimate, teachings of nature.