Choose an application
"What a good laboratory course ought to include is not yet wholly clear, and can only be settled by trial; till this has been done a superfluous liberty of selection may not be wholly a disadvantage. The experiments in these chapters cover but a part of the experimental field, chiefly that of sensation and perception, though it is evidently impossible to take out any sort of mental phenomenon for entirely independent examination. Subjects in this section include visual perception of space and motion, Weber's law and psychophysic methods, and suggested apparatus for psychological experiments." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved).
Choose an application
Choose an application
Choose an application
The five physical senses of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching have been held to underpin the complexity of human experience ever since Aristotle first theorised about how they worked. Classical and scholastic philosophy up to the time of the European Enlightenment relegated their operations to its margins, viewing them as at best a distraction from higher thinking, and at worst a positive deception. Paradoxically, what one could not objectively know, the products of the mind, were accorded precedence over the concrete. From the Romantic era onwards, the senses moved to the centre of speculative thought, and the various dialectical currents of philosophy after Hegel made them interdependent with the intellectual function, which was held to derive most or all of its authority from them. This tendency has continued down to the sensualist, hedonist and anti-intellectual currents of our own day. In this theoretical consideration of what has been done to the senses in modern experience, Stuart Walton subjects the life of the senses to a further materialist turn, one that refuses a spiritualisation of the material realm, to which contemporary discourses of the body have often fallen prey, while at the same time preserving sensuality from being delivered once again to a sterile idealism.
Choose an application
Choose an application
Choose an application
Choose an application
Choose an application
Choose an application