Original scientific paper

Bošković's Causal Explanations of Sense-Perception

Dario Škarica ; Institut za filozofiju, Zagreb, Hrvatska

Abstract

There are many passages in Bošković's dissertations where he discusses the origin of sense-acquired ideas, but mainly in the context of other, physical topics, not in the context of sense-perception itself. Bošković never formulated a systematic and general theory of the origin of sense-acquired ideas. There are only separate explanations of the origin - mainly incidental, and within other contexts. This paper unites the separate explanations in order to create a congruent model of Bošković's causal concept of sense-perception – since it is the principle of causality that is in the foundation of the separate explanations.
This model is then interpreted by means of two Scholastic doctrines, one of them dealing with the difference between condition (conditio) and cause (causa) and the other with accident (casus). The doctrines are presented according 10 St. Thomas' Summa theological and Summa contragentiles and Philosophiamentis et sensuum, a highly infiuential work in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, written by a Jesuit, Joannes Baptista Ptolemaeus. Several neo-Scholastic works are also considered (Josephus Gredt, O. S. R, Elementa philosophiae Aristotelico-Thomisticae and C. Willems, Institutiones philosophicae).
The analysis of Bošković's causal explanations of sense-perception generally shows: firstly, that - according to Bošković's views - there is always a concurrence of events involved in sense-perception, a connexion of two or more causal occurences - which makes possible our interpretation by means of the Scholastic accident doctrine (it is precisely the concurrence of two or more causal occurrences that the doctrine considers); secondly, that such an interpretation makes it possible - in the same way that Sholasticism does - to distinguish cause from condition, i. e. the causal occurrence that is the very cause of a perception from the one that preconditions the perception without causing it; thirdly, that this cause is the very cause of knowledge, sense, and that perception should therefore be considered in the first place as knowledge (unclear , indistinet, instinctive), i. e., that, on the other hand, reality itself should be regarded as the very object of this knowledge, of perception, and thus as precisely the precondition without which it would not be possible, but not as its cause.

Keywords

Hrčak ID:

81993

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/81993

Publication date:

4.12.1995.

Article data in other languages: croatian

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