Materialismo percettivo. Da Democrito a Lenin, da Hobbes a Kim

• Main Author: Michele Gardini
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Firenze University Press 2012-05-01
• Series: Aisthesis
• Subjects: Perception; Supervenience; Materialism; Philosophy of mind.
• Online Access: http://www.fupress.net/index.php/aisthesis/article/view/10941

The paper tries to outline something like a short “critique of pure materialism” in the domain of perception, a sketch showing – through a series of examples, picked out in an apparently heterogeneous fashion from the Western philosophical tradition – how this epistemological model each time, and in everyone of its forms, fails in giving account of the basic features of perceiving.  After giving a survey of authors like Democritus, Hobbes, De Sade, Lenin, the final appendix, devoted to the concept of “supervenience” and its treatment in Davidson and Kim, aims at summarizing the whole problem through the categories of the contemporary philosophy of mind. The conclusion is that a pure materialistic approach is incapable to give reason to some of the fundamental characteristics of perception, that make it one of the basic moods of “being-in-the-world”.