Vision and Mind: Selected Readings in the Philosophy of Perception

The volume is organized as a comprehensive reader on the philosophy of perception, beginning with broad theoretical issues about the nature of perception, perceptual consciousness, and the relation between visual experience and the external world. It then develops several major lines of inquiry: phenomenological critiques of sensation and objectivity; analytic discussions of the senses, intentionality, perceptual objects, hallucination, causation, and perceptual content; psychological and computational theories of visual perception, including direct visual perception, perception as hypothesis, and Marr’s computational approach; debates over ecological perception and the limits of representational explanation; studies of color vision, visual representation, sensory substitution, and embodied cognition; and discussions of consciousness, neural correlates, and sensorimotor accounts of visual awareness. Through these readings, the book contrasts orthodox views of vision as internal representation with heterodox approaches that understand perception as active, embodied, environmentally embedded, and inseparable from action.