THE BODY AS THE ACTIVE PRINCIPLE IN THE CONSTITUTION OF PERCEPTUAL SPACE Introduction

My thesis is that modern neurological discoveries overthrow the classical dualism which assigns all the constitutive activity of perception to the mind and leaves the body a purely passive role. The paper is in four parts: first I will present the traditional theory, using Berkeley's concept of activity as the key; then I will summarize the relevant aspects of contemporary neurology; third, the incompatibility of these two approaches will be discussed; finally, I will propose that we must reject the materialistic notion of the body and grant it a power of activity which was formerly held to be the monopoly of the mind. Throughout, I will take the spatialization of sensation as the prime example of a constitutive activity.