This book is about the nature of perception and its relation both with thought and the physiological dimension of sensation. It is a confirmation of the choice made by this series of books which is dedicated not to the philosophers, but to the key concepts of philosophy. In this way it is possible to deal with topics which go from philosophy to physiology and from psychology to the notional sciences. The book begins with Kant at the end of the 18th Century when psychology and physiology are created as empirical sciences. The book is divided into three main parts that study the beginning of the 19th century that is to say the cross between philosophical and physiological research (Schopenhauer, Mller, Helmoltz) and English common sense philosophy (Reid, Mill) and then the descriptive psychology and phenomenology in the 19th and 20th Century (Brentano, Bergson, James, Husserl) and, finally, the postwar developments from Merleau Ponty and Ayer up to the theories of Gibson, Neisser and Fodor.

Paolo Spinicci is a researcher at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Milan.