The Unity Of The Senses

Academic Press Series in Cognition and Perception: The Unity of the Senses: Interrelations Among the Modalities focuses on the perceptual processes, approaches, and methodologies involved in studies on the unity of the senses. The publication first elaborates on the doctrines of equivalent information, analogous sensory attributes and qualities, and common psychophysical properties. Discussions focus on discrimination, sensitivity, sound symbolism, intensity, brightness, and cross-modal perception of size, form, and space. The text then examines the doctrine of neural correspondences and sound symbolism in poetry, including sound and meaning, analogue and formal representation, vowel symbolism in poetry, coding perceptual information, coding sensory attributes, and evolution and development. The manuscript takes a look at synesthetic metaphor in poetry, as well as unity of the senses and synesthetic metaphor, warm and cool colors, synesthetic metaphors of odor and music, metaphorical imperative, and the music of Conrad Aiken. The publication is a valuable source of data for researchers interested in the unity of the senses.

In this stimulating and original analysis of some of the most important nineteenth-century poems in English, Kerry McSweeney offers an alternative to non-referential and New Historicist critical methods.

Philosophers and cognitive scientists address the relationships among the senses and the connections between conscious experiences that form unified wholes. In this volume, cognitive scientists and philosophers examine two closely related aspects of mind and mental functioning: the relationships among the various senses and the links that connect different conscious experiences to form unified wholes. The contributors address a range of questions concerning how information from one sense influences the processing of information from the other senses and how unified states of consciousness emerge from the bonds that tie conscious experiences together. Sensory Integration and the Unity of Consciousness is the first book to address both of these topics, integrating scientific and philosophical concerns. A flood of recent work in both philosophy and perception science has challenged traditional conceptions of the sensory systems as operating in isolation. Contributors to the volume consider the ways in which perceptual contact with the world is or may be “multisensory,” discussing such subjects as the modeling of multisensory integration and philosophical aspects of sensory modalities. Recent years have seen a similar surge of interest in unity of consciousness. Contributors explore a range of questions on this topic, including the nature of that unity, the degree to which conscious experiences are unified, and the relationship between unified consciousness and the self. Contributors Tim Bayne, David J. Bennett, Berit Brogaard, Barry Dainton, Ophelia Deroy, Frederique de Vignemont, Marc Ernst, Richard Held, Christopher S. Hill, Geoffrey Lee, Kristan Marlow, Farid Masrour, Jennifer Matey, Casey O'Callaghan, Cesare V. Parise, Kevin Rice, Elizabeth Schechter, Pawan Sinha, Julia Trommershaeuser, Loes C. J. van Dam, Jonathan Vogel, James Van Cleve, Robert Van Gulick, Jonas Wulff

"John Thiel attempts to counter this tendency toward "ecclesiastical fundamentalism" by proposing an interpretive schema for tradition analogous to the four senses of scripture."--BOOK JACKET.

This fascinating volume offers a transdisciplinary and transcultural approach to understanding the senses by exploring themes in anthropologies of sound, sight, smell, taste, touch, and movement as expressed through aesthetic, perceptual, religious, and spiritual experiences. In drawing upon comparative perspectives from Indian and Western theories, the essays demonstrate the integral relation of senses with each other as well as with allied notions of the body, emotion and cultural memory. Stressing the continued relevance of senses as they manifest in a globalized world under the influence of new media, this work will interest scholars of anthropology, cultural studies, sociology, ritual studies, psychology, religion, philosophy, and history.

The senses play a vital role in our health, our social interactions, and in enjoying food, music and the arts. The book provides a unique interdisciplinary overview of the senses, ranging from the neuroscience of sensory processing in the body, to cultural influences on how the senses are used in society, to the role of the senses in the arts.

In Perception and the Internal Senses Juhana Toivanen offers a philosophical reconstruction of Peter of John Olivi’s (ca. 1248-98) conception of the cognitive psychology of the sensitive or animal soul.

The Senses of Scripture reveals the essence of biblical epistemology - the ways in which ancient Israelites thought about and used their sensorium. The theoretical introduction demonstrates that scholars need to liberate themselves from the Western bias that holds a pentasensory paradigm and prioritises the sense of sight. The discussion of the biblical material demonstrates that biblical scholars should follow a similar path. Through examination of associative and contextual patters the author reaches a septasensory model, including sight, hearing, speech, kinaesthesia, touch, taste, and smell. It is further demonstrated that the senses, according to the HB, are a divinely created physical experience, which symbolised human ability to act in a sovereign manner in the world. Despite the lack of a biblical Hebrew term 'sense', it seems that at times the merism sight and hearing serves that matter. Finally, the book discusses the longstanding dispute regarding the primacy of sight vs. hearing, and claims that although there is no strict sensory hierarchy evident in the text, sight holds a central space in biblical epistemology.