Posts Tagged perception

Episode 48: Merleau-Ponty on Perception and Knowledge

Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on December 17, 2011

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:41:47 — 93.3MB)

Discussing Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s “Primacy of Perception” (1946) and The World of Perception (1948).

What is the relation of perception to knowledge? In M-P’s phenomenology, perception is primary: even our knowledge of mathematical truths is in some way conditioned by and dependent on the fact that we are creatures with bodies and senses that work the way they do. Science is great, but it doesn’t discover the truth of things hiding behind perception: it is an abstraction from certain kinds of perceptions. Other modes of approaching things, e.g. art, can equally well give us knowledge, though of a different kind.

Mark, Seth, Wes, and Dylan argue over whether this thesis is just a bunch of truisms and despair over not having read The Phenomenology of Perception, the longer work which what we did read was meant to summarize. Is M-P just saying that scientific knowledge is defeasible, which scientists already believe? Read more about this topic.

Buy “The Primacy of Perception and its Philosophical Consequences,”or read it online. Buy World of Perception,or read online.

End song: “Write Me Off” by Mark Lint and the Simulacra. Read about it.

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Episode 27: Nagarjuna on Buddhist “Emptiness”

Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on October 10, 2010

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:44:17 — 95.5MB)

Primarily discussing “Reasoning: The Sixty Stanzas” and “Emptiness: The Seventy Stanzas,” by the 2nd century Indian Buddhist Nagarjuna.

Is the world of our experience ultimately real? If not, does it have something metaphysically basic underlying it? For Nagarjuna, the answers are “no” and “no… well… not that we can talk about.”

Mark and Seth (Wes was sick) are joined by guest Erik Douglas to discuss metaphysics, causality, the possibility of remaking your perceptual habits, why someone who believes that all is empty might still want to act ethically, and how to deny a claim without affirming its equally dubious opposite.

Look at this document for our primary texts plus a couple of others that we mention; we also skimmed Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way. Secondary sources are discussed here.

End song: “Nothing in this World” by by Mark Lint and the Simulacra, recorded partly in 2000 and partly just now.

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