The Analysis of Sensations, and the Relation of the Physical to the Psychical

by Ernst Mach, C M Williams (Translation)

Physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach investigates the physical sensations of sight, sound, motion, and the perceptions of space and time. Mach is frank about his book incorporating both scientific and philosophical ideas. While acknowledging his investigations were on the border of what science had helped humans comprehend, he defends his work by stating that the manifold sensations a person experiences each day are the result of a complex interplay of biology and physics. As such, philosophical enquiries on the sensory experience are merited, for science alone cannot encompass or quantify the various sensations with a view to explaining their precise effects on the human mind and its thought processes. An example investigated by Mach is that of how certain sensory experiences appear to make time pass slower or faster. Often vivid experiences, a shocking sight, produce the sensation of time slowing - why this occurs and how it affects the mind is discussed at length. Though Mach met with both praise and opposition with the successive editions of this work, he is cheerful at having aroused such debate; he had appropriated aspects of science to philosophic ends.

Genres: Philosophy, Science, Psychology, Nonfiction, Physics

214 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1914

About the author

Ernst Mach was an Austrian physicist and philosopher and is the namesake for the "Mach number" (also known as Mach speed) and the optical illusion known as Mach bands.

Reviews

[saml · Rating 2 out of 5]

odd book. strangely organised, scrappy. occasionally wonderful to read, as mach's interest in so much of the world draws one through all the reams of antique trivia. mach has wonderful philosophical views, but he is not interested in treating them as philosophy, really, so the book is of little philosophical interest. the strangest thing about the volume is its introduction, which is almost solely devoted to consideration of mach's relation to freud

[Éric Loonis]

This text by Ernst Mach was impossible to find in French edition (except as used book at prohibitive prices), so I started to retranslate it and offer it to interested readers. Of course, it is aimed at an intellectual, scientific audience, even simply passionate about reflection on the relationship between the world, the body and the mind. I had a lot of fun translating the text of a great scientist and discovering his thoughts.