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Katherine Logan Guy
Philosophy

Beata Stawarska, Mentor

Sensible Semantics: George Berkeley's Theory of Vision and Twenty-first Century Cognitive Science

The work of George Berkeley, an eighteenth century empiricist philosopher, has been historically less successful than the work of his rationalist and empiricist contemporaries, primarily due to his unusual metaphysical claims. Berkeley’s work on visual theory, however, has garnered some attention in the last ten years from philosophers of cognitive science. Recent publications, by philosophers as diverse as Alva Noë and Shaun Gallagher, reveal a distinctive methodology in Berkeley’s theorizing about the nature of vision. Berkeley based his thesis on evidence culled from the conscious experience of visual perception, a method nearly opposite, and generating a conclusion nearly opposite that of his contemporary, René Descartes. Furthermore, Berkeley insisted upon the primacy of conscious experience for understanding visual perception. Therefore, his work could be described as having a (proto-) phenomenological orientation, which I argue is the very thing that gives his work its lasting relevance.