Galileo’s
Galileo believed that smell, odor, and color are only existent because of the presence of living creatures that perceived. He, therefore, states that if these living creatures were removed, then tactile, gustatory, visual, and olfactory senses would not be existent, “If the living creature were removed, (tastes, odors, and colors) would be wiped away and annihilated,” (Stitch & Donaldson, 117). His beliefs are therefore contrary to Locke’s indirect realism and Berkeley’s idealism theories,
I agree with Galileo’s theory the existence of smell, taste, and odor is dependent on the availability of creatures that perceive them. To begin with, I believe that these senses do not just exist, but were embedded in living creatures to enable their co-existence. I believe that it is these senses give a complete distinction to living creatures, and are, therefore, only specific to living creatures. Living creatures in this case, also referring to God. These are two things are go hand in hand, that is, the senses being designed for living creatures, and the living creatures operating based on these senses.
My argument seems to rely on Thomas Reid’s direct realism theory, which stipulates that material objects do exist, and so do sensory abilities, “According to direct realists, when you look at a giraffe, what you see is the giraffe itself, a material object, and not merely a giraffe-shaped mental image,” (Stitch & Donaldson, 112). The existence of these sensory characteristics of human beings gives them the ability to be annihilated. It would be impossible to remove what was not there in the first place. Second of all, as mentioned earlier, these senses are found in living creatures and therefore their removal means their removal.
One might argue that these senses are not engrained in living creatures and their removal would not mean the removal of these senses. The reality of not all living creatures possessing these senses raises doubts about whether they are existent at all. However, this occurrence has been proven to be mainly because of biological malfunctions and not natural coincidences. Moreover, the amount of knowledge acquired by the human intellect has been able to reverse these malfunctions. On the other hand, walls can never learn to smell in any realm, meaning they were never created to smell. Everything was created for a purpose, and in the same way, sensory abilities were specifically created for living creatures. The existence of these abilities without the creatures that perceive them would be meaningless. They would consequently be annihilated with the removal of the preceptors.
Furthermore, one might also argue about how we can perceive things differently if these sensory characteristics are there. Indirect realists debate that sensory, visual, and olfactory characteristics do not exist because they are just but mere perceptions, “Realists come in two varieties: direct realists and indirect realists. The indirect realists (e.g., Locke) believe we can’t perceive material objects, we can only perceive mental representations of material objects,” (Stitch & Donaldson, 113). The argument is further supported by the claim that the inability of secondary qualities to give an actual representation of objects makes them inexistent. However, just because people’s sensory abilities vary does not mean that they are inexistent. Living creatures were created to be different, and the uniqueness of the human fingerprint is one example of that. We were created to perceive things differently, and that does not rule out the fact that sensory abilities are inexistent. Sensory abilities do exist, and they are specific to living creatures. The removal of these living creatures causes their removal which would otherwise make them redundant.
Work Cited
Stich, Stephen P., and Tom Donaldson. Philosophy: Asking Questions–seeking Answers. Oxford University Press, 2019.