Laura Keating, Mechanism and the representational Nature of Sensation in Descartes, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 29/3, 1999, 411-430.

• vgl. 3. Med.
• AT VIIIA 35.
• AT XI 3.
• Optics, Discours 4.

Betrifft das Sehen von Farben.

The issue of this paper is wether (...) Descartes does also present an account of how sensations represent features of objects, or whether he treats them as non-representational. It will be argued that it is the latter (p. 412).

Zwei Theorien:

• a sensation points intrinsically to its cause although confusedly (Cottingham).
• sensations stand as mark for certain causal features (Larmore).

Dagegen:

Rather than giving an account of how sensation is representative of objects, Descartes gives an account of how the mind comes to refer non-representative sensations to the objects that the mind conceives to be their causes (p. 416).
Although the representational interpretation seems plausible at first, ultimately it is not supported by the text (p. 421).

Descartes distinguishes between the sensation of colour itself and the experience of it being as if in objects, and further, treats the former as an immediate effect produced in the mind and the latter as the result of an act of referring the sensation to its cause (p. 423).

Es scheint bei Keating, als urteile die Seele unmittelbar, daß eine nicht-repräsentierende Empfindung als Wirkung eines Gegenstandes zu nehmen sei - und zwar dann, wenn sie sich unwillkürlich einstellt (p. 427).

Descartes thinks that this unavoidable habit of infancy becomes part of the human perceptual process itself, over which we now have no conscious control (p. 425).

Dieses Urteilen kann aber kein Denken sein, denn sonst wären Menschen ebenso mit ihren Körpern verbunden wie auch Engel, die nichts fühlen.