The Human Question

The phantasm is a lens through which the intellect aims at the infinite.

For all that emergence is supposed to explain, it does not  show how things (at least living ones) take initiative.  Or (as my colleague Joe Petit says), emergence doesn't account for spontaneity. My take: a thing's being-the-principle-of-its-action is the best evidence one could give for the  substantial form (a.k.a., the soul) of living things.

I haven't the time to write this down right now, but hopefully I'll remember what the insight was when I read the heading. It has to do w what STAq said (in commentary on De sensu) re mere sensation as judgment (think Husserlian synthesis here).  This is the condition for the possibility of perception at the highest level (thinking of vis cogitativa/estimativa here)... and it has to do with the fact that perception is never of just this or that form of this or that thing, but of the whole concrete environment in relation to the perceiver (to misquote Phillipians: "...as something to be grasped at.")  In other words, it has to do with holism vs. particularism, being strongly in in support of a view of perception as holistic... and it has to do with Aristotle's mention somewhere in De anima that the unity of perceptual powers in the same subject makes possible our perception of the unity of perceptual objects in the same object thing...but it extends this poin...

Some view Copernicus' theory as the paradigmatic example of the replacement of the common sense understanding of nature with a science-based understanding.  They need to consider what really happened:  Copernicus gave a new, heliocentric description to the movement of the sun and planets across the sky;  later, Newton offered an explanation of that movement, replacing an Aristotelian/Ptolemaic understanding of the spheres with the Newtonian understanding of force and momentum.  Both the older and the newer description of the movement of these bodies presuppose the veracity of our perception, and both the older and the newer explanations of these movements presuppose the veracity of our common sense notion of causality (even Galilean relativity is a matter of common sense -- for anyone who has ridden in a vehicle).  Common sense is not utterly overturned by science: rather, common sense serves as the basis for explanation.  When there is a correction of one ...