Naslov
Boškovićeva kauzalna tumačenja sjetilnog opažanja
(Bošković's Causal Explanations of Sense-Perception)

Autori
Škarica, Dario

Izvornik
Prilozi za istraživanje hrvatske filozofske baštine (0350-2791) 21 (1995), 1-2 (41/42); 123-149

Vrsta, podvrsta i kategorija rada
Radovi u časopisima, članak, znanstveni

Ključne riječi
uzrok; uvjet; slučaj; sjetilno opažanje
(cause; condition; chance; sense-perception)

Sažetak
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 systemaric 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 to St. Thomas' Summa theologica and Summa contra gentiles and Philosophia mentis et sensuum, a highly influential 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.B., 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 occurences that the doctrine considers) ; secondly, that such an interpretation makes it possible - in the same way that Scholasticism does - to distinguish cause from condition, i. e. the causal occurence 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, indistinct, 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.

Izvorni jezik
Hrvatski

Znanstvena područja
Filozofija

POVEZANOST RADA