Abstract
In an act of perceiving the attributes of the substance are abstracted from it. Likewise sense organs have abstract functions: an eyeball sees not qua eye but qua seeing; it feels the eyelash not qua seeing but qua touching.
The properties special to a particular sense are all accidents of their substances: the shapes and colors of seeing; the sounds of hearing etc. When they are in the relation of perceiving, they are relata abstracted from these accidents and are not fully determinate. What is perceived represents the attributes of the substance but not in a perfect reflection.
Common perceptibles like shape and motion are perceived through the special sense organs but in another capacity: an eyeball perceives motion not in virtue of the visual sense but in virtue of the common sense . They are perceived per accidens but not fallaciously so. Common perceptibles like motion are constructed by both abstracting and then combining perceptions. Aristotle allows for error in perceiving, less so with special perceptibles than with the common ones; more so in perceiving per accidens than in perceiving per se. He recognizes two sorts of per accidens perception : one where the special perceptibles are used in constructing the common perceptibles , like motion ; the other based on collateral information, as with identifying the hooded man as the son of Diares. The fallacy of accident can come about typically in the latter case.
Perceptions provide the material from which universal concepts are abstracted. Universals exist in re; science is of these universals.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
- 3.
Also we moderns at least can then talk of plants having a sort of perception too, as they do respond to external stimuli with, say, increased cellular activity at the root cells that have come into contact with a higher concentration of water molecules.
- 4.
Still, for stylistic reasons, I shall use ‘sense organ ’ instead of ‘organ of perception’ etc.
- 5.
See Sorabji 1974: 162 for a general survey of interpretations of Aristotle’s theory of perception. Some, like Slakey , take perception as physiological [what Everson (1997) calls the literalist view]; others, like Solmsen , take it as purely not physical [Everson ’s spiritualist view]. Sorabji (1974: 167–8, 175) himself tends to side with the latter, as he takes perception itself to have a matter and a form, where the former is physical and the latter is not.
- 6.
Cf. (ps.) Simplicius , in de An. 190, 14–5; Plotinus , Enneads IV.4.23.26–7. In the case of sight or touch, the organ is a part of the body relative to some determinate function.
- 7.
Cf. Ross 1956: 267 on 424b17–8 (which has many possible translations!).
- 8.
See Caston 2005: 245–7 for a discussion of the dispute between Sorabji and Burnyeat .
- 9.
So too Caston 2005: 299.
- 10.
Reeve (2000: 149 ff.) juxtaposes these two accounts. He agrees with Burnyeat that the eye jelly becomes proto-colored and then the person sees color (Reeve 2000: 153). Still he then sides with Sorabji that these two differ and says that the “eye jelly is the hypothetically necessary matter of an organ whose form is seeing, and its taking on a proto-color constitutes, but is not identical to, seeing” (Reeve 2000: 156).
- 11.
This is the main flaw in Burnyeat ’s example that Aristotle views the perception of red to occur in the eyeball in the same way water in a glass takes on the color of a nearby red object. See Burnyeat 1992b: 425–7. (This is an English translation of a paper first published in French in Revue philsophique de la France de I ‘Étranger, Vol. 118 [1993] and, with corrections, in Études sur le de Anima d’Aristote, ed. G. Dherbey (Paris, 1995), and earliest in Revista latinamerica de philosofia, Vol. 20 1994.)
- 12.
“…the eye ’s becoming aware of red does not require its going red…” (Nussbaum and Putnam 1992: 36).
- 13.
Apparently these harmonies reflect the ratios of the lengths of the strings being plucked. [Sens. 439b25–449a6]
- 14.
Thus Aristotle explains that plants do not perceive because their organs receive the forms of external objects with their matter, and not apart from it.
- 15.
Cf. Simplicius , in Phys 414, 21–28 [also 493, 21], on whether energeia and entelechia are the same: not if ‘entelechy’ means ‘completion’. He cites Alexander , 412, 29–33: “…it is said to be an entelechy in virtue of this so far as the actuality in virtue of it is a completion of what is in potency, just as in the case of states the actuality in virtue of it is the completion of the state.”
- 16.
Also cf. Physics. I.1 (discussed below) where Aristotle says that a child first perceives a general image before a singular one.
- 17.
Themistius , in De An. 57, 4: “the forms of the perceptibles and the accounts (
) without the matter”. So too Everson 1997: 101. Summers
(1987: 27) concurs that the particulars called up by imagination
“…were, of course, the “forms” of particulars at the first level of abstraction from external sense. They were not, however, sufficiently abstracted to be the “universals” subject to the activity of intellect.” - 18.
Bolton (2005: 221) claims that we do perceive objects [substances?] too—but all he seems to mean by this is that animals can experience them “without intellection” [without rational activity?].
- 19.
Cf. Everson 1997: 117–23 on perception as a relation . He concurs that the correlative of ‘perception’ is ‘the perceptible’, and not the objects proper to each sense.
- 20.
Cf. (ps.) Simplicius , in de An. 262, 1–2: “For if it is not at some distance or if some other passion does not prevent, it is always true of the proper perceptibles.”
- 21.
- 22.
The translation of “form” seems to be following, e.g., (ps.) Simplicius , in De An. 167, 6–9: “For, even when the body is heated, the admission of the form is not in virtue of being heated but in virtue of operating cognitively in virtue of the form of the hot, since the organ as heated is perceptible but does not come to be perceptive.” For instance suppose hot honey is put on the tongue. The tongue itself senses the heat and the sweet but not in virtue of the same sense organ . The point here would be that the tongue insofar as it is the part of the body that is being heated and having something sweet adhere to it, is not the sense organ but just a body that is able to be perceived in these two different ways, of feeling and tasting.
- 23.
- 24.
(Ps.) Simplicius , in De An. 227, 36–7: “…but at the same time that he is calling forms not the accidents (for the perceptive soul is receptive of these) but those essences that are per se or completely of themselves insofar as being defined per se they are essential.”
- 25.
‘Body’ might be taken to signify the substance but more likely signifies the common perceptible , itself accidental (Lewis 1991: 286–7).
- 26.
Cf. (ps.) Simplicius , in De An., 183, 34–5.
- 27.
Kahn claims to be following Geach .
- 28.
Cf. Ward 1988: 220–1 on 424a20–21.
- 29.
- 30.
Hamlyn (1968: xvii, 88) finds that Aristotle uses “
” ambiguously between the sensation and the sense, just as ‘perception is the perception of something’ would exemplify. - 31.
Cf. Phys. 201b2–5; (ps.) Simplicius (in Phys. 425, 31–4) says that the visible is a relatum , while color is not but is per se. Rather color is a proprium of color. Color is not visible in virtue of the fact that it is color.
- 32.
Broadie (1993: 152) notes a possible exception: “…a strong-smelling substance can make the air around it smell the same, and he says that the substance has this effect by virtue of its smell even though smell perception does not result. Unfortunately Aristotle deals with this very cursorily.”
- 33.
- 34.
Moreover if the objects of mathematics are common perceptibles , their perception need not agree with any of the proper perceptions: Aristotle says that a mathematical line is not a perceived line.
- 35.
- 36.
- 37.
Contra Everson (1997: 150), who says, “The common sensibles are not such as to affect those [sense] organs…” I can agree to this only in virtue of the proper senses. He himself admits that “what are directly perceived are change and continuity in the proper sensibles.” But these are types of motion , a common perceptible .
- 38.
- 39.
- 40.
Aristotle does not seem committed to claiming that the common perceptibles are all perceived by all the senses. He says for instance that they are perceived mostly by sight. Cf. Hamlyn 1968: 204: “Rather the koine aisthesis is a potentiality possessed by each of the individual sense-organs, or at least by that of sight and touch.”
- 41.
Likewise in the Categories Aristotle speaks of propria , both special and common ones. E.g., 4a10; it is in this way that we should understand at 418a24–5: of the two sorts of per se perceptibles , the special ones are the special propria , while the common ones are propria not in the strict sense—not deny, with Everson (1997: 153) that common perceptibles are not the proper objects of the special senses, although perceived per se by them. See too Graeser 1978: 69–70, 79, 85–9.
- 42.
- 43.
Or, perhaps: all those able to do so: for locomotion or shape might be not able to be tasted etc.
- 44.
Cf. Brunschwig 1991: 455–74.
- 45.
- 46.
In On Dreams 458a15–6 Aristotle says that we seem to see that the approaching figure is white and is a man. However the context has it that this is what we seem to do. It’s just that sense perception is necessary for us to form that belief.
- 47.
See below on the fallacy of accident .
- 48.
Hence we get the doctrine of per se accidents . [Metaph. 997a7; 1025a30–5; 1029b16–23; Simplicius , in Phys. 803, 9–16] Cf. D. Frede 1992: 151.
- 49.
Although there are many interpretations of the passage. Cf. Hamlyn 1968: 118–20.
- 50.
“But if Aristotle’s description of perceptual consciousness as perception that we perceive still seems strange, consider the following [from Moore 1903: 449–50]: “A sensation is, in reality, a case of ‘knowing’ or ‘being aware of’ or ‘experiencing’ something. When we know that the sensation of blue exists, the fact we know is that there exists an awareness of blue…. To be aware of the sensation of blue … is to be aware of an awareness of blue; awareness being used, in both cases, in exactly the same sense.”” (Kosman 1975: 517).
- 51.
Block (1964: 61), on Somno 455b 1–14, stresses the relative independence of the common sense from the special senses. (Ps.) Simplicius (in de An. 172, 20–3; 171, 1–7) offers another explanation, that rational animals can perceive that they perceive and so ties that ability to the rationality of the perceiving animal (rather like Kant).
- 52.
Cf. Everson 1997: 68, 140–2.
- 53.
“It is that the De Anima is an incomplete and immature working-out of Aristotle’s views on sense perception, whereas Aristotle’s matured and crystallized views on this subject are to be sought in the Parva Naturalia…” (Block 1964: 58). Cf. Block 1961b. Likewise, Modrak (1987: 66–7) claims that Aristotle has a different account of the common sense in Somno and An. with respect to what is that in virtue of which a sense is aware of its own activity: in Somno 455a13 it is the common sense and in An. II.2 the sense itself. Cf. her n. 31 where she suggests that Aristotle might be considering different cases here. So too (ps.) Simplicius (in de An. 191, 7–8) says that Book III is about human perception unlike the previous books of De Anima.
- 54.
Thus Gregorić (2007: 125) says that Aristotle does not have a technical or a single meaning for ‘common sense ’.
- 55.
My interpretation does not conflict with Everson ’s claim that perceptibles are per se because they are the per se causes of changes in the sense organs. See Everson 1997: 155–7.
- 56.
Consider ‘facet’ as ‘face-t’, a certain respect or façade of the object. Cf.
. - 57.
In one sense, ‘(a) body’ signifies a substance; in another a quantum . Here it signifies a common perceptible as discussed above. In any case, it is still not the correlative of the visibly perceptible etc.
- 58.
Cf. Caston 2005: 309.
- 59.
- 60.
Just as with the Stoic example of a top, whose shape affects the nature of its motion when spun.
- 61.
“Aristotle holds perception to be a certain physical process, wherein certain perceptual or cognitive abilities of an organ of the body are actualized” (Burnyeat 1992a: 26). So too Everson 1997: 229; Slakey 1990: 77: “Perception is simply the movement which occurs in the sense organs, not some psychic process in addition to the movement in the organs.” Slakey (1990: 82–3) then claims that Aristotle’s theory of perception fails, as it cannot distinguish between say smelling and becoming odorous. Yet perception cannot be reduced to a purely material process: the formal, structural features themselves are not material constituents. Cf. Metaph. VII.3; Part. An. I.1; Sorabji 1974: 175.
Still, we should not neglect how much for Aristotle perception is a physical, or, better, a physiological, dynamic process, and not a conscious one. When we discuss sense perception, we tend to be speaking of the experience of it, especially since we human beings do have the experience (in Aristotle’s sense too) and the consciousness of the perception as well as the perceptions themselves. Aristotle himself makes this distinction at 425b12–3; 425b20. Cf. Bynum 1987: 92.
- 62.
Cf. Modrak 1987: 39.
- 63.
Still cf. Tht. 156a-157a, where Plato mentions the view that things perceived like the white or the hot have no being in themselves but only in the relational complex.
- 64.
As in Resp. X. I do not want to defend this interpretation of Plato in detail, but just to make the contrast with Aristotle.
- 65.
Still I can agree with Kahn (1992: 367) that only singulars are perceived, strictly speaking.
- 66.
More about noûs below.
- 67.
Cf. Bolton 1996: 303.
- 68.
Following Kant’s similar remark about Hume ’s analysis of causality: the same grounds on which Hume rejects a rational basis for claims about causality apply equally well to claims about substance.
- 69.
Perhaps thus (ps.) Simplicius , in de An. 190, 26 when he speaks of “types” (
) being presented to the imagination
by the sense organ
. - 70.
Themistius (in De An., 58, 11–4) refers to Cat. 7a35 on “stripping away” all the accidental attributes. Cf. Avicenna , Al-Burhān 160, 12–20.
- 71.
Most scholars today do seem to accept individual accidents (Frede 1987). Corkum (2008: 87, n. 20) gives a survey of secondary literature on whether individual accidents are non-recurrent or recurrent. Plato , Tht. 209c6 speaks of the snubness of the nose of Theaetetus differing from the snubnesses of other noses.
- 72.
I leave it open here whether there are individual items of intelligible substances, and, if so, of what sort, and how we come to be acquainted with them. As I have discussed a bit above, in ‘2 + 2 = 4’, we have two instances of the number two. Aristotle may take these as “individuals”; witness his doctrine of intelligible matter at Metaph. 1036a2–12; 1059b14–6.
- 73.
(Ps.) Simplicius , in De An. 182, 1–2: “substance is apprehended by reason and not by perception.”
- 74.
(Ps.) Simplicius , in De An., 127, 32–128, 2: “…just as we say that the master and the sculpture is a man per accidens because he is so not qua man. Thus in this way substance is perceptible per accidens, because not in virtue of being substance.”
- 75.
Hence the talk of ratios. Cf. Ward 1988: 220–1 on 424a20–21.
- 76.
So too Modrak 1987: 89; Robinson (1989: 69, n. 8) holds that the eikon must resemble things only in some respect.
I leave it open whether Aristotle requires a perception to have a perceiver “becoming aware of some sensible quality in the environment: [the “spiritualist” interpretation] or just that “the [sense] organ is so altered that it literally becomes like its (proper object” [the “literalist” interpretation]; so Everson 1997: 10–1. I admit that I am inclined to the literalist one, at least for the perceptions of animals like grubs. Indeed, I have been using ‘perceive’ and its cognates instead of ‘sense’ for this reason. Note that, on either interpretation, the reproduction of the form of the object being perceived need not be identical but only “like”.
- 77.
Everson (1997: 187–8) likewise suggests that we ought not take per se perception as perceiving the proper object (seeing the color) and per accidens perception as having propositional content (seeing that the red thing is an apple).
- 78.
Charles (2000: 123–4) agrees that Aristotle allows for error even of the proper perceptibles. Robinson (1989: 67) says, “To the extent that the percipient reports only this bare sensation, he cannot be wrong”—e.g., in reporting an ache, a flash of light, or a drumbeat. Yet this doesn’t help much: for now we have a self-conscious report applying linguistic expressions to the past perception. Surely all this goes far beyond the per se perception itself. Cf. (ps.) Simplicius , in de An., 261, 35–262, 10.
- 79.
But then (ps.) Simplicius , in De An., 126, 37–127, 8.
- 80.
As noted above, such too is, or at any rate has been, the presumption in modern psychological studies of perception. However, see Charles 2000: 121–2, n. 19 on what Aristotle requires for a sense organ to be “functioning well”.
- 81.
Thus Graeser (1978: 86) says that for Aristotle error and falsity only if there is synthesis .
- 82.
There are many variants of the text here, but these do not affect the doctrine that I am presenting.
- 83.
Hamlyn (1961: 26–7, 1968: 106) discusses how sense can err and in what way there cannot: “a sense cannot confuse its object with that of another sense; it can err over the identity and place of the material object which possesses the quality in question. It can also err over instances of its type of object.” He admits that the incorrigibility here is puzzling.
- 84.
This text has some variants and alternate readings.
- 85.
- 86.
Barnes 1994: 255. “If we were often mistaken in perceiving physical objects per se Aristotle could not say that the eye ’s perception of colored objects is always true. However, Aristotle says that the objects of indirect perception are often false (428b20), therefore physical objects cannot be objects of indirect perception” (Block 1960: 97).
- 87.
I do not mean that a sense perception of a red circle suffices to give scientific knowledge of redness or circles, but only materials from which such knowledge can be constructed. Actually, Aristotle generally says that color is the proper object of sight. [418a27 et passim; cf. Top. 119a30] Yet the shape too seems likely; cf. 425b6–9. It’s just that no other sense besides sight perceives color, and so here we have a “proper” object in the strict sense of the proprium .
- 88.
At Rhetoric 1370a28 Aristotle says that imagination is weak in getting at the truth, and our apprehension of common perceptibles depends upon imagination … Cf. Themistius , in De An. 90, 8–13; 91, 18.
- 89.
“Vision is the process of extracting from two-dimensional images information about the three-dimensional structure of the world” (Egan 1996: 232). Still, as Charles (2000: 127) notes, what we immediately perceive are “cross-modal, three-dimensional objects typically grasped by the senses working in tandem.” We, like Aristotle, have to work backwards, to separate, distinct principles .
- 90.
Cf. Ross 1955: 273–4 on the finger example in psychology.
- 91.
Perhaps Aristotle takes this basic discriminative sense to coming from the linkage of the proper sense organs with the region around the heart via the blood and its ducts. Narcy (1996: 252) says that Aristotle is reacting to the doctrines of Protagoras and Plato at Tht., 189e-190a; Soph. 263e.
- 92.
Cf. his account of the brutish, whose attributes are produced by disease or deformity. [Eth. Nic. 1145a30–3; also Metaph. 1010b6–11 on the erroneous perceptions of the weak and the sleeping and of those perceiving distant objects]
- 93.
Everson (1997: 188–91, 39, 45) takes 418a20–4 causally, to assert: that if x is perceived per accidens by s, then “x is an accidental cause of s’s perceiving some proper sensible.”
- 94.
Lorenz (1963: 26) reports that jackdaws are taught by their elders about friends or foes. The elder birds have more experience. The type of “memory ’ here need not require deliberation, intentionality, or reasoning. [Mem. 450a15–6] Rather, it is a process of the concatenation of movements of the various sense perceptions in the soul . Recollection , on the other hand, requires reasoning, as the one seeking to recollect constructs a sort of syllogism, and so must deliberate and think about what she is doing. [453a8–14] Cf. Robinson 1989: 72–3; Sorabji 1972.
- 95.
“Aristotle’s treatment of accidental perception in the DA and the De Sensu is no more than cursory—so cursory, in fact, that it would not be too hopeful to maintain that he provides any theory of accidental perception in those works” (Everson 1997: 192).
- 96.
It is worth noting that, while Aristotle himself does not have the clearest or most regular terminology, the English translations add to the confusion: both the special and the common perceptibles are “proper” perceptibles, even though strictly speaking only the former are perceived in virtue of the special senses. (Ross 1956: 270 discusses the problems with the manuscripts.) The common perceptibles are still “proper” perceptibles, in the sense of propria : some of them necessarily accompany the special perceptibles : we see no color without a shape. Note that some of the common perceptibles may be “proper” in the second sense of ‘per se’ given in An. Po. I.4: this gives the disjunctive reading discussed above.
- 97.
I shall assume for the sake of the example that Coriscus is the son of Diares: in fact probably not. See Ross 1955: 238–9.
- 98.
“…notons la construction et son sens : “fils de Diarès” sujet de la phrase mais sans article, est accident, et “1e blanc”, datif complement avec article, est sujet au sens de suppôt des accidents” (Cassin 1996: 284).
- 99.
That is, from the point of view of the perceiver, the connection is accidental. It might be essential to a son to have the father that he does.
- 100.
Not via one special sense, like touch, perceiving a perceptible of another sense, as in feeling a red patch. Cf. Brunschwig 1996: 215. He distinguishes “…deux sortes de perception par accident, celle d’un koinon par un sens spécial et celle d’un idion par un sens spécial autre que le sien. Cette tentative, je l’avoue, me paraît acrobatique.”
- 101.
Still, Themistius , in De An., 81, 32–5: “for the son of Cleon is not knowable from the color but also from many other things which it was not of a single perception to compose and examine, but is thereby perhaps of another, worthier power that the arational animals do not have in common.”
- 102.
Cf. the definition of motion at Physics 201a10–2 discussed above. Also in An. I.3 when discussing perception Aristotle alludes to his theory of the movement of animals. Perception would be automatic too.
- 103.
Wedin ’s account of per accidens perception also suggests this (Wedin 1988: 94, 205–6).
- 104.
See Themistius , in De An. 81, 35–82, 14 on various modes of perceiving per accidens
- 105.
Bäck 2000: 65–74 discusses being per se and per accidens.
- 106.
On the role of memory in per accidens perception cf. Weidmann 2001: 98–101.
- 107.
- 108.
Aristotle does not make it entirely clear whether the proper correlates are ‘perceived’ and ‘seen’ or ‘perceivable’ or ‘visible’. His theory might suggest the former, but his discussion at 7b35–8a12 suggests the latter.
- 109.
At best, a common perceptible will make reference to the proper perceptibles per se in the second sense of ‘per se’ distinguished at 73a37–b1, as a number is even “per se”, because the predicate ‘even’ makes reference to the subject in its definition—if it is true that a common perceptible is by definition visible or audible or gustative or olfactive or tangible.
- 110.
Cashdollar (1973: 162) errs when he claims that the typical case of per accidens predication reverses the usual order of subject and predicate. For, in any case, per se perception does that too. Per se versus per accidens perception is not the same as per se versus per accidens predication!
- 111.
A case can be made for items in other categories: e.g., via motion we can perceive such positions as sitting, whereas like being on top of (as with one color on top of another), perhaps some relations, including those of position and having and possibly perception itself, given a very strong interpretation of Aristotle’s claim that we perceive that we perceive. Aristotle works little of this out for us—and it would be quite involved.
- 112.
Below I discuss how we can come to know individual substances etc. at all. Here I suppose that we know them somehow, as we seem to and as Aristotle seems to assume too.
- 113.
On the practical syllogism , cf. Nussbaum 1978: 165 ff.
- 114.
Or, to avoid the appearance of an ‘I’ of self-consciousness : There is an ear of corn and hunger pains…
- 115.
So too in modern homomorphic theories of perception. Cf. Rosenthal 2005 where qualitative states, representing and caused by real structures of the objects perceived, need not be conscious.
- 116.
In contrast, Nussbaum 1978: 259. As Everson (1997: 159) says, she holds that “…the capacities of perception and phantasia play a complementary role: the activity of perception is to register the proper sensibles whilst that of phantasia is to interpret the information received in perception, allowing the subject to discriminate substances as such and act on them.”
- 117.
- 118.
Harte (2006: 25) finds the distinction already in Plato .
Hamlyn
) without the matter”. So too Everson 
” ambiguously between the sensation and the sense, just as ‘perception is the perception of something’ would exemplify.
.
) being presented to the imagination
by the sense organ
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. In G. Romeyer Dherbey & C. Viano (Eds.), Corps et Âme: sur le De Anima D’Aristote (pp. 391–404). Paris: J. Vrin.Author information
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Bäck, A. (2014). Perceiving. In: Aristotle's Theory of Abstraction. The New Synthese Historical Library, vol 73. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04759-1_5
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