Eric Schwitzgebel
speaker
445 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2011
last heard Jun 2011
Eric Schwitzgebel’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
So one interesting case of this, perhaps the most telling case of this, is Sextus Empiricus.
He's an ancient Greek skeptic, and he built his skeptical career, to a substantial extent, on the idea that things present different appearances under different conditions.
So he says, well, look, what seems in motion versus what seems stable depends on whether you're on the ship or the shore.
If you glance at the sun and then look somewhere else, things look different than if you haven't glanced at the sun.
If your hand has been in cold water and then you put it in warm water, the water feels warmer than if your hand hadn't been in cold water before.
He's got long lists of ways in which things seem different from different perspectives or in different conditions.
But nowhere in these lists does he say, oh, yeah, and, you know, does he give what seemed to us now to be really obvious kinds of cases if we accept this distortive kind of projective distortion view, right?
Nowhere does he say, oh, yeah, and it tilted backwards.
A penny looks elliptical if seen from an angle, but looks circular if seen square on, which is exactly the kind of thing that Sextus would have said had he thought of it.
It's almost unimaginable that Sextus would leave that kind of thing off his list if he'd thought of that.
He's got these long lists, so it's perfect for his point, and yet he never says it.
And he analogizes visual experience not to flat, projective media like paintings...
but rather to the impression of a signet on wax, which is an analogy that goes back at least to Aristotle.
And the difference here is that a signet is a mark, right?
We used a sign to prove, say, that a sealed envelope was sealed by you, right?
You've got a special figure that you press into the wax to indicate that that's your signature, basically, on that wax, right?
And if the signet is correctly applied, then the entire face of the signet goes onto the wax.
There's no kind of projective distortion about it.
Right?
Right.
Showing 161–180 of 445 · page 9 of 23
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