Outside world
The outside world is commonly used to refer to anything that is outside of a limited area that a particular person or group regards as their inner world or as their relatively isolated area of residence or interest. For example, one speaks of the outside world of a state or of the fact that a group of people is cut off from the outside world by a natural event. Often everything that is outside of one's own body is viewed and referred to as the outside world.
In philosophical texts in particular, the outer world is often referred to as the totality of objects and facts that do not belong to the consciousness of a perceiving subject, in contrast to the inner world, which includes the mental processes and states of the perceiving subject. In the sense of this understanding, the perceiving subject's own body, insofar as it is an object of sense perception, is assigned to the outside world. Whether and to what extent ideas about the outside world reflect reality or adequately represent it is controversially discussed in philosophy within the framework of epistemology and the philosophy of mind , in perceptual psychology and from a scientific point of view in physiology and in biology under the aspect of perception .
The question of the reality of the sensually perceptible outside world was already discussed in Plato's allegory of the cave . She is also the subject of thought experiments such as the argument from the brain in a vat with Hilary Putnam or in the modern science fiction film Matrix .
literature
- Ralf Schnell (Ed.): Perception, Cognition, Aesthetics: Neurobiology and Media Studies. transcript, 2005, ISBN 3-89942-347-X .
Web links
- Outside world. In: Friedrich Kirchner , Carl Michaëlis: Dictionary of basic philosophical terms. 5th edition. Leipzig 1907, pp. 78–79 (at zeno.org)
- Outside world. In: Rudolf Eisler : Kant-Lexikon. (at textlog)
- Victor Kraft : The problem of the outside world.