Hagner M
Institut für Medizin- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Medizinische Universität zu Lübeck.
Sudhoffs Arch. 1990;74(2):148-71.
In his "Objections and Replies" to the "Meditations" Descartes developed a concept of sensory perception as a three-stage mechanism. Firstly, it consists of a purely mechanical process which comprises an excitation of the sensory organs leading to motion in the nerves. Secondly, he understood perception as a psychophysical interaction in which a specific signal pattern representing the surroundings is presented to the soul. Finally, in stage three, classification and judgement of the object presented complete the perceptual process. Ernst Cassirer suggests that Descartes' conception of the soul is elucidated more precisely in his physiological writings, in which physiology is considered as a field for the application of philosophical analysis. In the present paper an attempt is made to demonstrate that Descartes' mechanistic concept of vision led to a definition of perception as a active process within the soul. Based on Kepler's theory of the inverted retinal image and a rejection of the traditional idea of light generated within the eye, Descartes arrived at the hypothesis that one must strictly differentiate between the object image and its perceptual correlate. Since the objective physical conditions do not suffice for a complete understanding of perception, a restricted validity of the mechanistic theory of vision is the consequence. Thus Descartes transposed the question of perception as an active process from neurophysiology to psychology and established its relevance within his own metaphysics, hereby laying the foundations for a psychological discussion of theories of vision in British Sensism.
在对《沉思集》的“反驳与答辩”中，笛卡尔提出了一种将感官知觉视为三阶段机制的概念。首先，它由一个纯粹的机械过程组成，这个过程包括感官器官的兴奋，进而导致神经中的运动。其次，他将知觉理解为一种心理物理相互作用，在这种相互作用中，代表周围环境的特定信号模式被呈现给灵魂。最后，在第三阶段，对所呈现对象的分类和判断完成了知觉过程。恩斯特·卡西尔认为，笛卡尔对灵魂的概念在他的生理学著作中得到了更精确的阐释，在这些著作中，生理学被视为哲学分析应用的一个领域。在本文中，我们试图证明，笛卡尔的视觉机械概念导致了将知觉定义为灵魂内部的一个主动过程。基于开普勒的视网膜倒像理论以及对眼睛内部产生光的传统观念的摒弃，笛卡尔得出了一个假设，即必须严格区分物体图像与其知觉相关物。由于客观的物理条件不足以完全理解知觉，视觉机械理论的有效性受到限制。因此，笛卡尔将作为主动过程的知觉问题从神经生理学转移到了心理学，并在他自己的形而上学中确立了其相关性，从而为英国感觉主义中视觉理论的心理学讨论奠定了基础。
