Aristotle on Perceiving Objects
Anna Marmodoro
Abstract
How can one explain the structure of perceptual experience? What is it that we perceive? How is it that we perceive objects and not disjoint arrays of properties? By which sense or senses do we perceive objects? Are the five senses sufficient for the perception of objects? Aristotle was the first to investigate these questions to a depth that makes his account fruitful even for contemporary philosophy, but also challenging. He addressed them by means of the metaphysical modeling of the unity of the perceptual faculty and the unity of perceptual content. This book offers a reconstruction of the ... More
How can one explain the structure of perceptual experience? What is it that we perceive? How is it that we perceive objects and not disjoint arrays of properties? By which sense or senses do we perceive objects? Are the five senses sufficient for the perception of objects? Aristotle was the first to investigate these questions to a depth that makes his account fruitful even for contemporary philosophy, but also challenging. He addressed them by means of the metaphysical modeling of the unity of the perceptual faculty and the unity of perceptual content. This book offers a reconstruction of the six metaphysical models offered by Aristotle to address these and related questions, focusing on their metaphysical underpinning in his theory of causal powers. By doing so, the book brings out what is especially valuable and even surprising about the topic: Aristotle’s metaphysics of perception is fundamentally different from his metaphysics of substance. Yet, for precisely this reason, his models of perceptual content are unexplored territory. This book is groundbreaking in charting this new territory: it offers an understanding of Aristotle’s metaphysics of the content of perceptual experience and of the composition of the perceptual faculty, and aims at bringing out the breakthroughs Aristotle achieved.
Keywords:
Aristotle,
the five senses,
perceptual faculty,
perceptual content,
causal powers,
causation
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2014 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199326006 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2014 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199326006.001.0001 |
