Concept
Sensualism
Overview
In epistemology, sensualism (also sensationalism or sensationism) is a doctrine whereby sensations and perception are the basic and most important form of true cognition. It may oppose abstract ideas.
This question was long ago put forward in Greek philosophy (Stoicism, Epicureanism) and further developed to the full by the British and French Sensualists (John Locke, David Hume, Étienne Bonnot de Condillac) and the British Associationists (Thomas Brown, David Hartley, Joseph Priestley). In the 19th century, it was very much taken up by the Positivists (Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, Hippolyte Taine, Émile Littré).
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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Therefore sensuality is a cognitive power. _On the contrary,_ Sensuality is defined as "the appetite of things belonging to the body."
Aquinas Thomas, Summa Theologica, Part I
States what Sensualism is; the author is tied to Sensualism in the knowledge graph.
Though we can give no account of those simple pleasures which the senses yield, because they are undecomposable, yet we distinctly know their characters as states of consciousness. Conversely, the complex pleasures formed by compounding and re-compounding the ideas of simple pleasures, though theoretically resolvable into their components, are not easy to resolve; and in proportion as they are heterogeneous in…
Herbert Spencer, The Data of Ethics
The author is tied to Sensualism in the knowledge graph.
The following is a graduated list of them. The genus is representation in general (representatio). Under it stands representation with consciousness (perceptio). A perception which relates solely to the subject as a modification of its state, is a sensation (sensatio), an objective perception is a cognition (cognitio). A cognition is either an intuition or a conception (intuitus vel conceptus). The former has an…
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason
States what Sensualism is.
Philosophers who discussed Sensualism
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
- Dugald Stewart
- Claude Adrien Helvétius
- Wilhelm Wundt
- Ludwig Feuerbach
- Giacomo Leopardi
- Antoine Destutt de Tracy
- Adam Burski
Related ideas
- Cognition
- The World as Will and Representation
- Auguste Comte
- John Locke
- Ancient Greek philosophy
- David Hartley (philosopher)
- Étienne Bonnot de Condillac
- Stoicism
- Hippolyte Taine
- Augustine of Hippo
- Thomas Aquinas
- University of Illinois Press
- Sense
- Herbert Spencer
- Perception
- Positivism
- Aristotle
- Epicureanism
- Joseph Priestley
- Cicero
- Arthur Schopenhauer
- David Hume
- Epistemology
- Thomas Brown (philosopher)
Place in the tradition
Part of French philosophy.