WGAP - Juan Piñeros Glasscock (Yale)

Title:  “The Unity in Aristotle’s Account of Perception”

Location: LC 203

Date and Time: Friday, April 19th, 4-6pm

 

Abstract:  In the De Anima, Aristotle famously distinguishes between two kinds of perception (αἴσθησις): proper (καθ’ αὑτά) perception, and incidental (κατὰ συμβεβηκός) perception (DA 418a7-25 et passim). Many take these as two radically distinct phenomena: perception proper is viewed as a sensory capacity concerned with an unstructured array of properties (e.g. colours, sounds, etc.), and incidental perception is viewed as an intellectual, predicative capacity concerned with universals rather than particulars. In this paper, I argue for an alternative interpretation that shows why these are species of a single phenomenon. On this view, proper perception is a capacity to identify and discriminate perceptual unities: individual, extended objects moving in an objective world. Incidental perception is the capacity to perceptually identify and discriminate objects that are known to possess non-sensory properties (e.g. being Diares’s son). My argument for this view centrally depends on a novel interpretation of Aristotle’s argument against the possibility of a special organ for the common sensibles (DA 425a7-25). This argument hinges on the claim that the very possibility of incidental perception is dependent on the possibility of perceiving perceptual unities via our proper perceptual capacities, since incidentally perceiving something consists in perceptually identifying a perceptual unity as the thing in question (e.g. identifying the white thing approaching as Diares’s son). My interpretation of this passage, if correct, is of independent interest: it shows that Aristotle anticipated the insight usually ascribed to Kant, that our perceptual experience must have a certain structure if perception is to play the cognitive role that it does in our lives.