H. H. Price | |
|---|---|
| Born | Henry Habberley Price 17 May 1899 Neath, Wales |
| Died | 26 November 1984 (1984-11-27) (aged 85) Oxford, England |
| Alma mater | New College, Oxford |
| Era | 20th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | |
| Academic advisors | H. A. Pritchard[2] |
| Notable students | Brian David Ellis[2] |
Main interests | Philosophy of perception |
Notable ideas | Theory ofafterlife |
Henry Habberley PriceFBA (17 May 1899 – 26 November 1984), usually cited asH. H. Price, was a Welsh philosopher, known for his work on thephilosophy of perception. He also wrote onparapsychology.
Born inNeath,Glamorganshire, Wales, Price was educated atWinchester College andNew College, Oxford. He obtained first-class honours inLiterae Humaniores in 1921. He was a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, 1922–4, Assistant Lecturer in philosophy at the university of Liverpool (1922–23), Fellow and Tutor of Trinity College, Oxford (1924–35), Lecturer in philosophy at Oxford (1932–35) andWykeham Professor of Logic and Fellow of New College (1935–59). Price was president of theAristotelian Society from 1943 to 1944. He was elected to the British Academy in 1943.
Price is perhaps best known for his work on thephilosophy of perception. He argues for a sophisticated sense-datum account, although he rejectsphenomenalism. In his bookThinking 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.
He died inOxford.
Price had written various publications onparapsychology, often advocating new concepts and theories. He was President of theSociety for Psychical Research (1939–40, 1960–1)
Price had speculated on the nature of theafterlife and developed his own hypothesis about what the afterlife may be like. According to Price after death the self will find itself in a dream world ofmemories and mental images from their life. Price wrote that the hypothetical "next world would be realms of real mental images." Price however believed that the self may be able to draw upon its memories of previous physical existence to create an environment of totally new images. According to Price, the dream world will not follow the laws ofphysics just as ordinarydreams do not. In addition, he wrote that each person will experience a world of their own, though he also wrote that the dream world doesn't necessarily have to besolipsistic as different selves may be able to communicate with each other bydream telepathy.[3][4][5][6]
Price developed the concept of "place memories" (seeStone Tape). He proposed thathauntings could be explained bymemories becoming lost from an individual'smind and then somehow attaching themselves to the environment which could be picked up by others ashallucinations.[7][8] He also believed that "place memories" could explainpsychometry.[9]
Linking his afterlife hypothesis with the concept of place memories Price proposed another hypothesis called the "psychic ether" hypothesis. He wrote that this hypothesis would explain where thememories would be stored forhauntings as well as forclairvoyance,ghosts and otherparanormal phenomena. Price proposed that a universal psychic ether coexistingdimension exists as an intermediary between themental and ordinarymatter. According to Price the psychic ether consists of images and ideas. Price wrote that apparitions are actually memories from people and that under the right conditions they can be seen as hallucinations. Price believed that the dreamlike world of the afterlife exists in the psychic ether.[10][11][12][13] According to (Ellwood, 2001) the psychic ether of Price is "a posited level of reality consisting of persisting, dynamic images created by the mind and capable of being perceived by certain persons."[14]
Some researchers have attempted to update the afterlife hypothesis of Price. Michael Grosso (1979) in an extension of Price's theory suggested that the "ego may become fragmented in the afterlife state and when ones wish's and desires are played out may experience a transpersonal state akin to those experienced by the mystics".[15][16] Thepsychical researcher Ralph Noyes (1998) published an article discussing the theories of Price and attempted to update them with recent finds in parapsychology. Noyes proposed that the mental world of Price is a "psychosphere" which he defined as a "vast and complex cauldron of ideas, memories, volitions, desires and all the other furniture of conscious experience and unconscious mental functioning".[17]
The most common criticism of HH Price's afterlife hypothesis has come from the religious community as his suggestions are not consistent with traditional Christian teaching, nor the teachings of any othermonotheistic religion.[18]
"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."
