Vision, Gerald - Problems of Vision: Rethinking the Causal Theory of Perception

The topic of perception has never drifted far from philosophical consciousness, but it turned obsessive with the seventeenth- eighteenth-century ascendancy, first, of epistemology and then, more particularly, of idea empiricism. It is difficult to find a prominent philosopher of that period who did not have much to say about the nature of perception or its objects. Even Spinoza, who held sensory information in lower esteem than virtually all his contemporaries did, shows inordinate concern for explaining the senses.