Primary and Secondary Qualities: The Historical and Ongoing Debate
Lawrence Nolan
Abstract
The central aim of this book is to trace the historical development of the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, which lies at the intersection of issues in metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of perception. The volume focuses on the modern period or the age of the Scientific Revolution, the locus classicus of the distinction, but begins with chapters on ancient Greek and medieval Scholastic accounts of qualities in an effort to identify its origins. The next ten chapters offer fresh interpretations of seventeenth‐ and eighteenth‐century treatments of the distinction betwe ... More
The central aim of this book is to trace the historical development of the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, which lies at the intersection of issues in metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of perception. The volume focuses on the modern period or the age of the Scientific Revolution, the locus classicus of the distinction, but begins with chapters on ancient Greek and medieval Scholastic accounts of qualities in an effort to identify its origins. The next ten chapters offer fresh interpretations of seventeenth‐ and eighteenth‐century treatments of the distinction between types of quality. Virtually every major figure is represented from Gassendi to Kant, and special attention is paid to Locke, Descartes, and Hume, who merit two chapters each. The last two chapters are devoted to contemporary accounts of the status of colour, but their respective authors link their discussions to early modern debates about the nature of secondary qualities. The volume ranges over topics such as the foundation for the distinction, arguments for it, whether it is metaphysical or merely epistemic, the nature of sensory representation, the relation between philosophy and science, the nature of scientific explanation, the status of dispositions, and the semantics of sensible quality terms.
Keywords:
primary qualities,
secondary qualities,
sensible qualities,
dispositions,
representation,
resemblance,
mechanism,
perception,
corpuscularianism
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2011 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199556151 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2011 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199556151.001.0001 |
