Aristotle on Perception

Abstract In this book, Stephen Everson offers a comprehensive investigation of Aristotle's account of perception. Everson explains how Aristotle accounts for our ability to perceive such things as colours and sounds, as well as material objects. Everson has two main aims: the first is to place Aristotle's theory of mind within the context of his natural science, in particular, to show that Aristotle's account of perception is an application of the explanatory method of the Physics. To this end, Everson is keen to emphasize, against recent interpretations, that Aristotle explains perception in terms of material changes in the organs that possess perceptual capacities. The second aim is to argue that Aristotle's resulting method of explaining mental activity has substantive advantages over contemporary accounts in the philosophy of mind, such as functionalism and supervenience. Much of Everson's argument is directed against Myles Burnyeat's interpretation of Aristotle’ philosophy of mind. According to Burnyeat, Aristotle argues that the sense organs undergo alteration without undergoing any material change: Everson calls this reading, the ‘spiritualist’ reading. Everson opposes this with the ‘literalist’ reading, according to which a sense organ is physically altered whenever it perceives something; it therefore takes on a property of the sensible object that affects it. In order to defend this reading, Everson presents a detailed account of the role of matter and material change in the perceptual activities of the each of the individual senses, and also of the perceptual system as a unified whole, including the activities of phantasia or imagination.