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The first English translation of Gilbert Simondon’s wide-ranging course on the philosophical and scientific histories of perception

Translated into English for the first time, Gilbert Simondon’s A Course on Perception: 1964–1965 engages in a wide-ranging inquiry into the structure, operation, and activity of perception. Investigating its history throughout the centuries, Simondon shows how perception continually shapes and is reshaped by various strands of philosophical and scientific thought.

Prior to the advent of the natural sciences, perception functioned as the foundation of philosophical reflection and the sole instrument for acquiring knowledge and truth. Tracing his subject from these roots in antiquity, Simondon’s course draws on the work of other prominent philosophers such as Spinoza, Berkeley, Hume, and Bergson to follow the evolving trajectory of perception in the wake of classical Cartesian rationalism. As the realms of biology, physiology, and positivism in the natural sciences emerged with the Modern epoch, perception became a necessary theoretical starting point for philosophical investigations of an organism’s relation to its particular milieu.

Emerging from a course delivered at the Sorbonne in Paris between 1964 and 1965, Simondon utilizes a transdisciplinary approach to better understand the sensitivities that various life forms use to orient themselves in the world, offering a nuanced examination of perception in all its philosophical complexity.

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A radical rethinking of the theory and the experience of mental images

Here, in English translation for the first time, is Gilbert Simondon’s fundamental reconception of the mental image and the theory of imagination and invention. Drawing on a vast range of mid-twentieth-century theoretical resources—from experimental psychology, cybernetics, and ethology to the phenomenological reflections of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty—Imagination and Invention provides a comprehensive account of the mental image and adds a vital new dimension to the theory of psychical individuation in Simondon’s earlier, highly influential work.

Simondon traces the development of the mental image through four phases: first a bundle of motor anticipations, the image becomes a cognitive system that mediates the organism’s relation to its milieu, then a symbolic and abstract integration of motor and affective experience to, finally, invention, a solution to a problem of life that requires the externalization of the mental image and the creation of a technical object. An image cannot be understood from the perspective of one phase alone, he argues, but only within the trajectory of its progressive metamorphosis.