Issue 30 - No.4/2020

New Philosopher

For curious people

New Philosopher1 min readPsychology
Perception
It wasn’t until I was 12 years old that my parents figured out I was almost as blind as a bat. Like Thomas Nagel, I was unable to imagine what it was like to be a bat, let alone how others could see, so blind I had remained. A world sharply in focus
New Philosopher1 min read
New Philosopher
Zan Boag Antonia Case Carlos Egan, Aida Novoa Genís Carreras Nigel Warburton Louise Antony, Marina Benjamin, Oliver Burkeman, Antonia Case, Tom Chatfield, Myisha Cherry, André Dao, Will Hartley, David S. Oderberg, Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore, Susanna S
New Philosopher1 min read
Online At Newphilosopher.com
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. Now more than ever I want to cling to the idea that findin
New Philosopher5 min read
Contributors
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 Perc
New Philosopher2 min readPsychology
To Be Is To Be Perceived
Unsurprisingly for a man who argued for the nonexistence of matter, Bishop Berkeley didn’t have much time for common sense. In Principles of Human Knowledge, he complained about the “opinion strangely prevailing amongst men, that houses, mountains, r
New Philosopher2 min readPsychology
Pierre Is Not Here
In his masterwork Being and Nothingness, written during the Nazi occupation of France, Jean-Paul Sartre asks us to imagine a scene from everyday life: You walk into a café. You’re meeting your friend Pierre there, but you are running late. You look a
New Philosopher2 min readPsychology
Like Riding A Bike
We talk about ‘knowing’ how to type, or how to ride a bicycle. But what kind of knowing is this? Descartes, who introduced the mind-body split, would break down those actions into distinct phases. First, we sense the keyboard, or the bicycle and the
New Philosopher1 min readPsychology
More Than Meets The Eye
Like figure-ground organisation, perceptual grouping (sometimes called perceptual segregation) is a form of perceptual organisation. Organisms perceive some parts of their perceptual fields as “hanging together” more tightly than others. They use thi
New Philosopher1 min readPsychology
Seven Laws
According to Gestalt Psychology, people perceive the whole of something even if it is not there. The Gestalt’s Law of Organization states that people have seven factors that help to group what is seen into patterns or groups. The grouping of images o
New Philosopher5 min readPsychology
Shifting Perspective
Recently, as civilisation has proceeded on its journey to hell in a handcart, I’ve found myself picturing a rocky coastline somewhere: a collection of giant boulders, standing impassive amid the crashing waves of a turbulent sea. I’m not sure where t
New Philosopher2 min readPsychology
Perception
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 blend
New Philosopher5 min readPsychology
Hallucinations
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
New Philosopher5 min readPsychology
Seeing The Good
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
New Philosopher1 min readPsychology
Checker Shadow Illusion
The squares marked A and B are the same shade of grey. The visual system needs to determine the colour of objects in the world. In this case the problem is to determine the grey shade of the checks on the floor. The visual system uses several tricks
New Philosopher1 min read
Cartesian Roommates
Author/illustrator: Corey Mohler, Existential Comics. For more comics visit existentialcomics.com ■
New Philosopher4 min readPsychology
Our Conscious Perception
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
New Philosopher5 min read
Staring At The Shadows
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
New Philosopher2 min readSocial Science
News Or Propaganda?
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 mul
New Philosopher5 min readPsychology
Under The Influence
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 Q
New Philosopher4 min readPsychology
Pervasive Illusions
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 en
New Philosopher5 min readPsychology
Phenomenology of Perception
“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 fa
New Philosopher5 min read
Character Versus Reputation
Let’s play a game of Would You Rather. Would you rather speak 5 languages or speak to animals? Would you rather run fast or fly slow? Would you rather be rich or famous? Would you rather travel 100 years to the past or the future? I know, these are h
New Philosopher2 min read
Perception
“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 o
New Philosopher1 min readPsychology
Perception /pəˈsɛpʃ(ə)n/
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 stimul
New Philosopher5 min readPsychology
Believing Is Seeing
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
New Philosopher15 min readPsychology
Entrenched Perceptions
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 Ox
New Philosopher1 min read
Perfect Perception
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
New Philosopher10 min readPsychology
A Perception Of Something
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 investigation
New Philosopher3 min read
Perception
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 whic
New Philosopher1 min read
Dot & cross
Hold the magazine at eye level at arm’s length. Close your right eye and look directly at the cross with your left eye. Notice that you can also see the dot. Focus on the cross, but be aware of the dot as you slowly bring the magazine towards your fa
New Philosopher20 min readPsychology
Perceptual Triggers
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
New Philosopher6 min readGlobalization
Chains Of Transmission
A man is standing in his weather room – or so I imagine – looking out to the Arabian Sea. Perhaps he can see Dharavi from his 27th floor perch. In the heart of Mumbai, Dharavi is the largest slum in Asia. In this neighbourhood of almost one million p
New Philosopher6 min readEarth Sciences
A better Anthropocene
Our globally connected planet is changing faster than we could ever have imagined. For much of 2019, the lungs of our Earth – the Amazon rainforest – was burning; while only months later, our sunburnt county was doing the same. Both were blanketed in
New Philosopher1 min read
Writers’ award XXIX
Award XXIX: purpose. Closes 10 December 2020 Award XXX: perception. Closes 10 March 2021 Email your piece to news@newphilosopher.com For full details visit www.newphilosopher.com/articles/prize Open to subscribers only. ■
New Philosopher3 min readPsychology
Our Library
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 habitu
New Philosopher1 min readPsychology
Documentaries
Your eyes and ears don’t tell you the truth. That’s not what they’re for. The senses evolved to enable us to survive and succeed in the world, not to represent it accurately. Now, for the first time, science is revealing exactly how the sense organs
New Philosopher2 min readPsychology
Around The Web
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 persist
New Philosopher1 min readPsychology
Scintillating Grid Illusion
In the scintillating grid illusion, illusory dark spots are perceived on white patches at the intersections of grey bars. Studies have suggested that processing related to the orientation of the bars plays a role in this illusion, but the specific un
New Philosopher1 min readPsychology
Baron Vaughn
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. W

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