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People naturally understand “perception” and “reality” as two parts of the same experience. We see the world around us, and we know that it exists whether we see it or not.Ancient Greek thinkers believed that objects caused our perception of them. They thought that objects sent out something like tiny copies of themselves that our minds picked up.This idea influenced how they understood reality. They believed that the reality of an object was the same as its properties, the things that made it what it was.Thomas Aquinas, a philosopher in the 13th century, introduced a new idea about reality. He said that the reality of something wasn’t just its properties, but its own separate “existence.” Things exist on their own, independent of anything else.This new idea, combined with the old idea about perception, led to a problem called “representationism.” Representationism is the idea that we don’t perceive the world directly, but only through mental copies or representations of it.Representationism leads to “existential skepticism,” the idea that we can’t be sure if the world outside our minds really exists. This caused a crisis in philosophy because if we can’t be sure the world exists, how can we know anything about it?Philosophers like Descartes and Hume tried to solve this problem, but they didn’t realize that representationism was the root cause. They kept assuming that our minds work by creating copies of the world.The author argues that the relationship between perception and reality is not equal. We need a real world to perceive, but the world doesn’t need our minds to exist.The author believes that modern philosophy is stuck because it hasn’t questioned these old assumptions about perception and reality. We need to rethink how we understand these basic ideas to move forward.
Chapter I.2
This paper argues that modern philosophy has been stuck because of a wrong turn it took a long time ago.
Here’s a breakdown of the author’s argument:
The author suggests that the way to get unstuck is to study the history of philosophy and understand how these ideas developed over time. By understanding where we went wrong, we can start to find a better way forward.
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