Search Results

Al-Kindī wrote a well-known treatise On Intellect, which was the first Arabic treatise to give a taxonomy of the types of intellect (following Greek sources, especially Philoponus, in interpreting Aristotle’s De Anima). The chapter argues that the epistemology implied by this treatise implies that al-Kindī makes a sharp divide between intellect, which knows, and the senses, which experience particulars. This is parallel to his strongly dualist account of soul. The chapter concludes by considering the difficulties this raises for “mediating” psychological phenomena such as imagination, which is explored most fully by al-Kindī in a discussion of prophetic dreams.

In De Anima, Aristotle develops an analogy between perception and thought. This is based, I argue, on his account of what causally determines the object (or content) of the relevant perception or thought. I examine (1) how his account accommodates visual error and erroneous thoughts and (2) the analogy between the role of light in colour perception and the Active Intellect in the case of thought. Aristotle's account of the object of thought in De Anima supports his account of the signification of names in De Interpretatione. This supports claim (1) in Ch. 4.

One of the main purposes of De Anima III.1 is to show that there can be no sense in addition to the five familiar ones — that is, sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. Aristotle supplies an argument in which he concludes for the common perceptibles — such as change, shape, or magnitude — ‘we have an aisthesin koinen’. This is usually taken to imply that the common perceptibles are perceived by the common sense. The logic and the terminology of Aristotle's argument is analysed in this chapter, and it is shown that the phrase does not in fact refer to any higher-order perceptual capacity, but rather it describes an aspect of properly functioning individual senses, namely their sensitivity to the common perceptibles. This interpretation respects the logic of Aristotle's argument and accommodates the facts that the key phrase occurs without the definite article and in reverse word order.

This chapter examines whether De Anima 431 ^b 5 contains an elliptical occurrence of the phrase ‘common sense’, and if so, what is its exact reference. As a starting point, it is assumed that the main purpose of the passage is to show that the thinking capacity of the soul can determine what is to be pursued and avoided both in the presence and in the absence of perception. In the presence of perception, the thinking capacity determines what is to be pursued and avoided with respect to things that are given to us by perception. There are good reasons to take the phrase ‘ommon sense’ with reference to a non-rational cognitive ability by which accidental perceptibles, such as alarm signals, are grasped, and this should be identified with the sensory capacity of the soul.

This chapter examines Aristotle's claim that the soul is an inner principle of change, against the background of his account in the Physics of nature as an inner principle of change. That for Aristotle, the study of the soul is part of the study of nature is clear already from the opening lines of the De anima, where he announces that ‘knowledge of the soul seems to contribute greatly to all truth but most of all the truth in relation to nature: for the soul is such a thing as a principle of animals’. The study of the soul is valued, then, for its contribution to our knowledge of nature. The reason for that claim is in turn that the soul is such a thing as ‘a principle of animals’. Aristotle thinks that the soul really is a principle of animals. The ‘such as’ here serves rather to put epistemic distance to the claim: we do not yet know what it means for the soul to be a principle, so the vagueness is appropriate. The chapter seeks to overcome some of that vagueness.

This chapter examines Aristotle's notion of perceptual discrimination, which he discusses in De Anima III.2 (426 ^b 8-427 ^a 16) and III.7 (431 ^a 20 ^b 1). In the first of these passages the solution from De Sensu 7 seems to be rejected because it cannot account for perceptual discrimination of two or more homogeneous special perceptibles, e.g. black and white. That solution is supplanted by another one in which Aristotle compares the discriminating capacity to the geometrical point. This analogy is closely examined and an interpretation of its application to the case of perceptual discrimination of homogeneous special perceptibles is proposed. This interpretation is then supported, if only tentatively, by an analysis of a notoriously difficult passage from De Anima III.7. It is concluded that Aristotle's explanation of simultaneous perception and perceptual discrimination of two or more homogeneous special perceptibles is rather unsatisfactory.

The conclusion discusses the common sense as envisioned by Aristotle, particularly what he himself designates with the phrase and what we should designate as the Aristotelian notion of the common sense. Aristotle designates three different things with the phrase ‘common sense’ and its variants. An individual sense, namely touch, is called a ‘common sense’ in Historia Animalium I.3 489 ^a 17. It is so called because it is shared by all animals, for the sense of touch is found in every individual animal of every species. Similarly, all the individual senses indiscriminately are called ‘common senses’ in Metaphysics I.1 I.1 981. In De Anima III.1 Aristotle distinguishes an aspect of the properly functioning individual senses according to types of features perceived, and calls it ‘aisthesis koine’, which is often wrongly interpreted as the ‘common sense’. Finally, the phrase ‘common sense’ is used in De Partibus Animalium IV.10 686 ^a 31, De Memoria et Reminiscentia 1 450 ^a 10, and De Anima III.7 431 ^b 5 consistently as a proper name for the sensory capacity of the soul which comprises the perceptual and the imaginative capacities. Paradoxically, Aristotle never uses the phrase ‘common sense’ to refer to the higher-order perceptual power which emerges from the unity of the perceptual capacity of the soul, which is how the common sense tends to be understood in later tradition. However, he does refer to it as a ‘common power which accompanies the individual senses’ in the De Somno et Vigilia 2. Four distinct functions of the common sense have been identified and discussed: simultaneous perception, perceptual discrimination, control of the senses in waking and sleep, and monitoring of the senses.

This chapter looks at Aristotle's account of the perceptual capacity of the soul as delineated in the treatise De Anima. Like the soul as a whole, the perceptual part of the soul is divided conceptually into the individual senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. Each of these senses receives a separate treatment in the second book of the De Anima. In the third book Aristotle deals with certain issues concerning perception in such a way that it becomes clear that the perceptual capacity of the soul is not an aggregate of the individual senses, but a unified whole. That is, Aristotle's conceptual division of the perceptual part of the soul permits it to be differentiated into distinct sense-modalities while at the same time remaining a unity.

This chapter continues the investigation of the phenomenon that Aristotle describes as ‘perceiving that we see and hear’ by analysing the much discussed passage from the beginning of De Anima III.2 in which Aristotle seems to maintain that we perceive that we see by sight, without even mentioning the possibility that we do so by a higher-order capacity. This appears to be in flat contradiction with what he says in De Somno et Vigilia 2, discussed in the preceding chapter. It is argued that the De Anima III.2 is an aporetic passage in which Aristotle replies to a challenge posed by Plato in the Charmides. It is important to note that Aristotle meets the challenge on Plato's own terms, which is why he does not introduce any higher-order capacities. Because this passage is dialectical, we should not take its conclusion to be Aristotle's considered view. In the course of his argument Aristotle mentions that it is by sight that we perceive darkness. However, it is argued that sight as such cannot achieve the perception of darkness. What is required is a higher-order capacity which registers inactivity of the sense of sight. Since the awareness of the activity of an individual sense is the work of the common sense, it is natural to suppose that awareness of an individual sense's inactivity is the work of the common sense. So the common sense provides us with the awareness of both the activity and inactivity of the individual senses. This monitoring function of the common sense is comparable with certain modern conceptions of consciousness.