Aristotle’s Parva naturalia continues the investigation begun in the De anima. The De anima defines the soul and treats its main powers, nutrition, sense perception, intellection, and locomotion. The Parva naturalia — On sense and sensible objects, On memory and recollection, On sleep, On dreams, On divination in sleep, On motion of animals (De motu animalium ), On length and shortness of life, and On youth and old age and respiration — attends more to bodily involvement with soul. While each (...) work offers fascinating and challenging insights, there has never been as extensive a commentary covering them together. A reason is that the works have often been viewed as incidental and even inconsistent. The De motu animalium has not typically been included, when viewed as an isolated work on animal locomotion. This commentary argues that the treatises, considered together and with the De motu among them, display a tight sequence manifesting an artful, yet easily overlooked, design. We reveal many techniques of Aristotle’s writing that have received little consideration previously. Our commentary contributes to a unified and comprehensive account of Aristotle’s overall project regarding the soul and its connections with the body. (shrink)

In his Commentary on Ptolemy’s Harmonics, Porphyry debunks Ptolemy’s quantitative theory of pitches by demonstrating that pitches are qualitative attributes of sound. I argue that Porphyry’s main concern is to save the phenomenological dimension of sound while preserving the possibility of a quantitative analysis of music. I show how he draws on the Aristotelian tradition to develop a theory of pitches as emergent properties that covary with some underlying quantitative features without being reducible to them. Porphyry offers an original and (...) compelling solution to the classic problem of how to provide a quantitative analysis of a qualitative phenomenon. (shrink)

Our modern scientific explanation of colour as a subjective impression has replaced a ‘pre-theoretical’ notion of colour as an intrinsic property of objects, which was mainstream in ancient thought. Why have we lost such pre-theoretical notion, and what have we lost by losing it? I argue that most ancient Greek philosophers exploited this pre-theoretical assumption – one that was obvious to them – in terms and ways that are still worthy of attention in the context of contemporary philosophy of colour. (...) I offer an in-depth analysis of the theories of a number of early Greek philosophers, as well as of Plato in the Timaeus, showing that they tend to share the idea that colour is an essential property of external bodies and therefore plays a causal role in perception. Then I focus on a comparison between Democritus’ stance and Aristotle’s in order to highlight a significant contrast between the two. Democritus' theory is an exception in ancient thought because it traces the colour phenomenon back to a refraction of atmospheric light through atomic aggregates. Aristotle, instead, posits the presence of colour and light in the bodies themselves. Finally, I interpret Aristotle's account as the most complex attempt in ancient thought to weld together what we call the ‘manifest image’ of colour and its ‘scientific image’. (shrink)

Traditional interpretations of Aristotle’s theory of perception mainly focus on uncovering the underlying mechanisms that are at stake when perceivers are affected by sensible qualities. Investigating the nature of sense perception is one of Aristotle’s main worries and one that he explicitly relates to the question of its causes (e. g.Sens. 436a16–17, 436b9) and its ends (e. g.de An. 434a30 ff.). Therefore I suggest that, in order to fully explain Aristotle’s view of perceptual phenomena, the possibilities, the constraints, and the (...) goals defined by the embodied and situated engagement of perceivers with the external world must be taken into account. Accordingly, in this paper, I provide an affective reading of Aristotle’s theory of perception. I shall ask what, in addition to functioning sense organs and appropriate response mechanisms, the perceiver contributes to perceptual content. Specifically, I propose to shed light on the significance of perceptual experience for the perceiver and I aim to show that, according to Aristotle, one’s biological and personal qualities are perceptually relevant, meaning that they underpin perception, rather than coming into play after perception has occurred and its objects have been discerned. The paper is divided into two parts, respectively dealing with sensory affections and more complex affective phenomena. As regards the domain of primal sense perception, I will focus on smell as a representative example: since Aristotle identifies it as the least developed of human sensory faculties, it will serve as a revealing illustration of how sense perception is informed and qualified by what, drawing on contemporary philosophical terminology, I will call ‘perceptual interests’, viz. the affective sense of what is at stake in the living being’s interaction with the environment. I will then proceed to consider the way more complex affective phenomena underpin perception by examining the case of emotions and that of virtues of character. By showing how perception is affectively inflected and how emotion is rooted in perception’s bodily nature, I aim to sketch out the general lines along which I believe that the Aristotelian theory of perception should be approached. (shrink)

Objectivism about perceptible qualities like colors and sounds is the view that perceptible qualities are ontologically and conceptually independent from perception. We ordinarily think of Aristotle as an objectivist about perceptible qualities – even the arch-objectivist. Yet this consensus has long been threatened by various thorny passages, including especially De anima III.2, 425b26–426a28, which appear to suggest that Aristotle is no objectivist, but a subjectivist. I show that recent attempts to make sense of these passages by appeal to Aristotle’s three-stage (...) distinction between first potentiality, second potentiality/first actuality, and second actuality commit Aristotle to a subjectivism that he cannot consistently endorse. I argue for an alternative that vindicates Aristotle’s objectivism. (shrink)

The aim of my article is to present the critique by Brentanians – more precisely, by Brentano himself and his students Stumpf and Marty – of the thesis that colours are properties that are relational to a perceiver. For Brentanians, colours are monadic physical properties. Brentanians, I will show, think that colours do not exhibit a relationality to perception when we experience them, and that the concepts of them do not contain any mark representing a relation to perception; this phenomenological (...) and logical non-relationality, they think, allows them to hold that colours are not relational by nature. Despite arguing that colours are monadic and physical, Brentanians also hold that colours do not exist in reality, and in their opinion these two theses are perfectly compatible. I will further show that although Brentanians (especially Marty) claim that colours are monadic, they nonetheless allow for a loose relationality of colours to perception which is, however, identical to that of any other physical property. I will conclude by discussing some interesting consequences of the Brentanian theory for contemporary debates about colours. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The problem of “scotopic vision”, or vision under conditions of partial or total darkness, is one of the most enigmatic and least studied topics in Aristotelian psychology. In the article we present the exegesis of Averroes on this matter. We point out a dificulty that arises in the Great Commentary around some terms used to designate the obscurity in the whole of the theory. We propose as a solution a moderate interpretation of the matter, in accordance with the “principle (...) of economy” and the traditional exegesis of the commentators. (shrink)