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Abstract:
It has become typical to read Kant and Merleau-Ponty as offering competing approaches to perceptual experience. Kant is interpreted as an 'intellectualist' who regards perception as conceptual 'all the way out', while Merleau-Ponty is seen as Kant's challenger, who argues that perception involves non-conceptual, embodied 'coping'. In this paper, however, I argue that a closer examination of their views of perception, especially with respect to the notion of 'schematism', reveals a great deal of historical and philosophical continuity between them. By analyzing Kant's theory of schematism, the interpretation of it by the Neo-Kantian Pierre Lachièze-Rey, and Merleau-Ponty's theory of the body schema, we find that aspects of Merleau-Ponty's theory of perception are better understood as a development of Kant's theory of perception.

AbstractMerleau-Ponty's relationship with his Sorbonne professor Léon Brunschvicg is usually disregarded or mentioned by scholars as a mere anecdote. Moreover, the rare discussions of the latter's "critical idealism" usually take at face value Merleau-Ponty's partial and biased account. In contrast, this paper argues that in order to understand the genesis of Merleau-Ponty's thought, it is necessary to reassess Brunschvicg's idealism and his views on the relationship between perception and scientific knowledge. Particular attention is drawn to a specific chapter of Brunschvicg's masterworkL'Expérience humaine et la causalité physique, entitled "Théorie intellectualiste de la perception". Therein is articulated the theory of perception that Merleau-Ponty never ceased to contest, and of which his entire oeuvre constitutes a reversal. However, far from highlighting only the elements of opposition, the author also points out the thematic continuity that survives the generational gap between the two authors.

AbstractRecently, the relationship between evolutionary ecology and perceptual science has received renewed attention under perception-mediated selection, a mode of natural selection linking perceptual saliency, rather than veridicality, to fitness. The Interface Theory of Perception (ITP) has been especially prominent in claiming that an organism's perceptual interface is populated by icons, which arise as a function of evolved, species-specific perceptual interfaces that produce approximations of organisms' environments through fitness-tuned perceptions. According to perception-mediated selection, perception and behavior calibrate one another as organisms' capacities to experience and know the objects and properties of their environments lead to responses highlighting certain environmental features selected for survival. We argue this occurs via the Umwelt/Umgebung distinction in ethology, demonstrating that organisms interact with their external environments (Umgebung) through constructed perceptual schema (Umwelt) that produce constrained representations of environmental objects and their properties. Following Peircean semiotics, we claim that ITP's focus on icons as saliency-simplified markers corresponds to biosemiotics' understanding of perceptual representations, which manifest as iconic (resembling objects), indexical (referring), or symbolic (arbitrary) modalities, which provide for organisms' semiotic scaffolding. We argue that ITP provides the computational evidence for biosemiotics' notion of iconicity, while biosemiotics provides explanation within ITP for how iconicity can build up into indices and symbols. The common contention of these separate frameworks that the process of perception tracks saliency rather than veridicality suggests that digital/dyadic perceptual strategies will be outcompeted by their semiotic/triadic counterparts. This carries implications for evolutionary theory as well as theories of cognition.

A paradigm shift has altered our world in practically every sphere and it can be attributed to the Covid-19 pandemic. Modern science and technologies have been called upon to redesign various processes in order to cope with this outbreak and the changes it has wrought. Even the world of education has been subject to severe disruption. To deal with the new situation, the students and teachers have been forced to change the way they customarily taught, learnt and interacted. The entire educational framework will have to be transformed from the traditional face-to-face or physical system to the virtual Moodle education system. The entire school system and higher education system in Sri Lanka are now called upon to confront these new challenges if they are to continue the learning and teaching processes. Fortunately, the higher education institutions have managed to find a quick remedy, by moving to online learning to overcome the difficult situation. Although many learning theories have been introduced to evaluate the learning processes in the physical classroom, the Gestalt learning theory is slightly different from the other theories. This is because the Gestalt theorists emphasize the need for whole perception, which can only be achieved by focusing on the entire learning process and making sense of things by thinking of them deeply. The process of thinking involved selecting, organizing, interpreting and creating meaning. This processing method is called 'insight learning'. Hence, this study is an attempt to assess the feasibility of developing insight learning in virtual learning. The data was collected through Google forms, and the conclusion is based on the more than 700 responses received from undergraduate students in the Faculty of Arts and Culture, Eastern University, Sri Lanka. The SPSS software was used to record and analyze data using factor analysis and descriptive statistics. The study shows that there are many factors that prove to be obstacles in the way of developing insight learning via an online learning system. Therefore, the study recommends some strategies to overcome these obstacles and adopt the new online learning process in the future.

Received: 31 October 2021 / Accepted: 9 December 2021 / Published: 3 January 2022

Art perception is viewed as a conscious or unconscious deciphering operation which may or may not lead to a true understanding. It requires a more or less complex code which has been more or less completely mastered. The work of art (like any cultural object) may disclose significations at diff levels according to the deciphering stencil applied to it. Uninitiated perception, reduced to the grasping of primary significations, is a mutilated perception. Through sociol'al observation it is possible to reveal, effectively realized, forms of perception corresponding to the diff levels, which theoretical analysis frames by an abstract distinction. The most uninitiated perception is always inclined to go beyond the level of sensations & affections. The work of art considered as a symbolic asset only exists as such for a person who has the means to appropriate it, ie, to decipher it. An agent's degree of art competence is measured by the degree to which he masters the set of instruments (ie, interpretative schemes) for the appropriation of the work of art, available at a given time. Interpretative schemes are the prerequisite for the deciphering of works of art offered to a given society at a particular time. Art competence can be provisionally defined as the preliminary knowledge of the possible divisions into complementary classes of a universe. This system of classification enables each element of the universe to be placed in a class necessarily determined in relation to another class. Artistic competence can therefore be defined as the previous knowledge of the strictly artistic principles of division which enable a representation to be located (through the classification of its stylistic indications) among the universe of art. The art code as a system of possible principles of division into complementary classes of the universe of representations offered to a particular society at a given time is in the nature of a soc instit. This soc instit must be considered a historically constituted system, founded on soc reality. The modal readability of a work of art varies according to the divergence between the code which it objectively requires & the code as an historically constituted instit. In each period, the rules defining the readability of contemporary art are but a special application of the general law of readability. Familiarization by repeated perceptions is the privileged mode of acquiring the means of appropriating (in a cultural sense) works of art. These theses are applied to a discussion of art educ & the function of the museum. M. Maxfield.

The People's Republic of China witnessed unprecedented growth at the end of the twentieth century and the manner in which it will choose to use its consequent power in the twenty-first century has become a hotly debated topic in foreign policy circles. Some have chosen to interpret China's emergence as an economic and aspiring military superpower as a threat to the national interests of the United States and Asian-Pacific security. This threat has been categorized as ideological, economic, and strategic. This essay explores the China threat theory through an in-depth analysis of the arguments of "anti-China hands" as outlined in a variety of right wing publications. - The paper is part of "Perceptions and misperceptions in US-China relations". (J Contemp China/DÜI)