This paper addresses the nature of touch or ?tactual perception?. I argue that touch encompasses a wide range of perceptual achievements, that treating it as a number of separate senses will not work, and that the permissive conception we are left with is so permissive that it is unclear how touch might be distinguished from the other senses. I conclude that no criteria will succeed in individuating touch. Although I do not rule out the possibility that this also applies to (...) other senses, I suggest that the heterogeneity of touch makes it both distinctive and particularly problematic. (shrink)

Touch seems to enjoy some epistemic advantage over the other senses when it comes to attest to the reality of external objects. The question is not whether only what appears in tactile experiences is real. It is that only whether appears in tactile experiences feels real to the subject. In this chapter we first clarify how exactly the rather vague idea of an epistemic advantage of touch over the other senses should be interpreted. We then defend a “muscular thesis”, to (...) the effect that only the experience of resistance to our motor efforts, as it arises in effortful touch, presents us with the independent existence of some causally empowered object. We finally consider whether this muscular thesis applies to the perception of our own body. (shrink)

Aristotle is history’s most famous and influential proponent of the view that there are exactly five senses. But was he entitled to hold this view, given his other commitments? In particular, was he entitled to treat touch as a single sense, given the diversity of its correlated objects? In this paper I argue that Aristotle wished to individuate touch on the basis of its correlated objects, just as he had the other four senses. I also argue, contrary to what is (...) often supposed, that he was well-placed to do so, given his other commitments and views. (shrink)

Aristotle’s Naïve Somatism is a re-interpretation of Aristotle’s cognitive psychology in light of certain presuppositions he holds about the living animal body. The living animal body is presumed to be sensitive, and Aristotle grounds his account of cognition in a rudimentary proprioceptive awareness one has of her body. With that presupposed metaphysics under our belts, we are in a position to see that Aristotle in de Anima (cognition chapters at least) has a di erent explanatory aim in view than that (...) which the literature generally imputes to him. He is not explicating what we would call the “mental”—the private, inner realm which some take to be of a di erent kind than the physical—as most take him to be. His explanandum is content acquisition; the explanans is showing how the body becomes like various aspects of objects. Although he famously describes the mind (nous) as unmixed with the body, he is guided by functional constrains—nous cannot be limited or qualified if it is to potentially think all things. Thus, his inquiry into cognition is philosophically limited from a contemporary perspective. Aristotle is not doing philosophy of mind, for he doesn’t seem to find the “mental” philosophically perplexing. (shrink)

The paper posits a relationship between the sensory modality of touch, including a sense of active movement, and early modern knowledge of active powers in nature. It seeks to appreciate the strength and appeal of knowledge built on the active-passive distinction, including that which was retrospectively labeled animist. Using statements by Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Stahl, rather than detailed new readings of texts, the paper asks whether scholars drew on phenomenal, or conscious, awareness of activity as effort encountering (...) resistance when they reasoned about activity in the world. How were there relations and analogies between descriptions of psyche’s relation to body, of the relation of living forces to matter, of relations among material objects, of God’s relationship to His creation, and of relations involving causal agency generally? It is possible to understand what were later called animistic theories as belonging to the mainstream of the new natural philosophy, not to a residue of unscientific argument. Early modern theories of active and vital powers cannot be dismissed because they were based, in error, on mere analogy to human action. Rather, they had a central position in reasoning grounded in phenomenal awareness of action-resistance when a person is “in touch.”. (shrink)

Aristotle’s works on natural science show that he was aware of the affective powers of colour. At De an. 421a13, for example, he writes that hard-eyed animals can only discriminate between frightening and non-frightening colours. In the Nicomachean Ethics, furthermore, colours are the source of pleasures and delight. These pleasures, unlike the pleasures of touch and taste, neither corrupt us nor make us wiser. Aristotle’s views on the affective powers of colours raise a question about the limits he seems to (...) place on the affective powers of pictures at De an. 427b15-24, where he implies that pictures do not affect us immediately. In this paper, I examine the contrast between the affective powers of colour and the affective powers of pictures. I argue that colours can give rise to pleasure and pain in themselves and generate emotions incidentally. Similarly, pictures can please us or affect us in themselves and incidentally. In light of this account, I suggest that, on a plausible reading of De an. 427b15-24, the affective powers of pictures as mimetic objects are not immediate because they require an intervening cause in order to be effective. The representations of pictures and statues affect us either with the mediation of deception or with the mediation of interpretation. (shrink)

This paper aims to identify several interpretive problems posed by the final part ofDAII.11 (423b27–424 a10), where Aristotle intertwines the thesis that a sense is like a ‘mean’ and an explanation for the existence of a ‘blind spot’ related to the sense of touch, adding the further contention that we are capable of discriminating because the mean ‘becomes the other opposite’ in relation to the perceptible property being perceived. To solve those problems, the paper explores a novel interpretation of Aristotle’s (...) claims, arguing that they describe a homeostatic physiological reaction by which the sensory apparatus responds to perceptible stimuli. According to the proposed interpretation, such homeostatic reaction constitutes a necessary condition for perceiving what Aristotle refers to as ‘proper’ perceptible features, which include properties like ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ as well as colors and sounds. (shrink)

Proposes an innovative rethinking of Aristotle’s work as a system that integrates his theology with his doctrine of reproduction and life. In this deep rethinking of Aristotle’s work, Abraham P. Bos argues that scholarship on Aristotle’s philosophy has erred since antiquity in denying the connection between his theology and his doctrine of reproduction and life in the earthly sphere. Beginning with an analysis of God’s role in the Aristotelian system, Bos explores how this relates to other elements of his philosophy, (...) especially to his theory of reproduction. The argument he develops is that in talking about the cosmos, Aristotle rejected Plato’s metaphor of artisanal production by a divine Demiurge in favor of a biotic metaphor based on the transmission of life in reproduction, in which pneuma—not breath as it is often interpreted but the life-bearing spirit in animals and plants—plays a key and sustaining role as the vital principle in all that lives. In making this case, he defends the authenticity of the treatises De Mundo and De Spiritu as Aristotle’s, and demonstrates Aristotle’s works as a unified system that sharply and comprehensively refutes Plato’s, and in particular replaces Plato’s doctrine of the soul with a theory in which the soul is clearly distinguished from the intellect. “Bos offers a fresh, interesting, and important perspective. His interpretation will be very controversial, but if he is right, the standard Anglo-American interpretation of Aristotle will have to change radically.” — Malcolm Wilson, author of Structure and Method in Aristotle’s Meteorologica: A More Disorderly Nature. (shrink)

Whether Aristotle wrote the treatises of Metaphysics with different conceptions of the science of Being in mind has long puzzled scholars. The particular question that causes them unease is whether Aristotle’s enterprise in establishing the science of Being through the several treatises of Metaphysics is marked by a general science of Being, studying all departments of Being whatsoever, or whether his investigation of this science reflects an attitude towards a special metaphysics seeking knowledge of a special department of Being, in (...) this case, God, and therefore should be regarded as a science that is eminently theological. In this thesis, I aim to show that Aristotle’s enterprise in Metaphysics does not necessarily hinder reconciliation between the universal and the theological dimensions of the science of Being and that although Aristotle's conception of the science of Being is eminently theological it does not conflict with its also being universal. Furthermore, I aim to show that had the conception of the science of Being in Aristotle’s mind not been theological, it would not be universal either. (shrink)

It remains at best controversial to claim, non-figuratively, that plants are cognitive agents. At the same time, it is taken as trivially true that many animals are cognitive agents, arguably through an implicit or explicit appeal to natural science. Yet, any given definition of cognition implicates at least some further processes, such as perception, action, memory, and learning, which must be observed either behaviorally, psychologically, neuronally, or otherwise physiologically. Crucially, however, for such observations to be intelligible, they must be counted (...) as evidence for some model. These models in turn point to homologies of physiology and behavior that facilitate the attribution of cognition to some non-human animals. But, if one is dealing with a model of animal cognition, it is tautological that only animals can provide evidence, and absurd to claim that plants can. The more substantive claim that, given a general model of cognition, only animals but not plants can provide evidence, must be evaluated on its merits. As evidence mounts that plants meet established criteria of cognition, from physiology to behavior, they continue to be denied entry into the cognitive club. We trace this exclusionary tendency back to Aristotle, and attempt to counter it by drawing on the philosophy of modelling and a range of findings from plant science. Our argument illustrates how a difference in degree between plant and animals is typically mistaken for a difference in kind. (shrink)