Henry Habberley Price (May 17, 1899 – November 26, 1984) was a British philosopher, known for his work on perception. He also wrote on parapsychology.
Born in Neath, Glamorganshire, Wales, he was educated at Winchester College and New College, Oxford. He became Wykeham Professor of Logic, and Fellow of New College, in 1935. He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1943 to 1944.
Price is perhaps best known for his work on the philosophy of perception. He argues for a sophisticated sense-datum account, although he rejects phenomenalism. In his book Thinking and Experience, he moves from perception to thought and argues for a dispositionalist account of conceptual cognition. Concepts are held to be a kind of intellectual capacity, manifested in perceptual contexts as recognitional capacities. For Price, concepts are not some kind of mental entity or representation. The ultimate appeal is to a species of memory distinct from event recollection.
Quotes
"When I see a tomato there is much that I can doubt. I can doubt whether it is a tomato that I am seeing, and not a cleverly painted piece of wax. I can doubt whether there is any material thing there at all. Perhaps what I took for a tomato was really a reflection; perhaps I am even the victim of some hallucination. One thing however I cannot doubt: that there exists a red patch of a round and somewhat bulgy shape, standing out from a background of other colour-patches, and having a certain visual depth, and that this whole field of colour is directly present to my consciousness."
- Price, H. H. Perception. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1932.
Works
- Perception (1932)
- Truth and Corrigibility (1936)
- Hume's Theory of the External World (1940)
- Thinking and Representation.(1946) Hertz Trust Philosophical lecture, British Academy
- Thinking and Experience (1953; second edition, 1969)
- Belief (1969) (1959-61 Gifford Lectures, online)
- Essays in the Philosophy of Religion, based on the Sarum lectures 1971 (1972)
- Philosophical Interactions with Parapsychology: The Major Writings of H. H. Price on Parapsychology and Survival (1995) editor Frank B. Dilley
- Collected Works of Henry H. Price (1996) four volumes, editor Martha Kneale
- Thinking and Experience, and Some Aspects of the Conflict between Science and Religion (1996) reprints
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