Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society

Abstract

OF the nine articles contained in this volume the most important are, perhaps, Prof. Alexander's essay on “Mental Activity in Willing and Acting,” and Prof. Stout's rejoinder, “Are Presentations Mental or Physical?” The point at issue in these.papers is one of fundamental importance for both psychology and the theory of knowledge, since Prof. Alexander's contention, to put it quite plainly, is that all mental activity consists solely of conation and feeling, or possibly, since it is conceivable that the feeling or affective side of mental life may be reducible to experience of successful and thwarted conation, of conations alone. Hence he refuses to admit the existence of such cognitive processes as have usually been supposed to be denoted by the names sensation, imagination, perception. On his view the object apprehended in all these processes is physical; the process involved is simply conation directed towards a specific physical object. It follows, of course, that if Prof. Alexander makes out his case, “presentations” must be deleted entirely from our account of the stuff out of which mind is made, and, in the theory of knowledge, any doctrine which assumes either that “we can only know our own sensations,” or that, at, any rate, we begin by knowing our sensations and have to infer from them the character of the physical realities which are their stimuli, must be erroneous. Prof. Stout's criticism appears to show that Prof. Alexander's doctrine cannot be sustained as it stands, but the fact that it can be put forward by a writer of such philosophical eminence is an interesting sign of the influence which Avenarius is at last beginning to exercise on British philosophy.

Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society.

New series, Vol. ix. Pp. 259. (London: Williams and Norgate, 1909.) Price 10s. 6d. net.