Abstract John Locke’s theory of perception takes shape in a time of chaos: the orthodox account of this most basic tie between mind and world is crumbling. Among the ruins, new combatants vie for dominance against the old Aristotelian view, chief among them the Cartesians and the neo-Epicureans. The aim of this book is to provide a unified reading of Locke’s theory of perception, informed by...
Descartes’s treatment of perception in the Optics, though published before the Meditations, contains a distinct account of sensory experience. The end of the chapter suggests some reasons for this oddity, but that the two accounts are distinct is difficult to deny. Descartes in the present work topples the brain image from its throne. In its place, we have two mechanisms, one purely causal, the...