Aristotle’s philosophy of mind is often understood as anticipating present-day functionalist approaches to the mental. In Aristotle on the Sense-Organs Johansen argues at length that such interpretations of what Aristotle has to say about the senses are untenable. First, Aristotle does not allow that the matter of a sense-organ can be identified without reference to the form or function of the organ, so sense-organs are not compositionally plastic. Second, Aristotle’s conception of sense-perception is radically different from anything a philosopher today, (...) functionalist or not, would find credible: acts of sense-perception on Aristotle’s view do not require material changes in the sense-organs. Developed carefully throughout all six chapters, Johansen’s defense of this latter claim is the most significant part of the book, and it will be my focus here. (shrink)

This book offers an important study of Aristotle's theory of the sense-organs. It aims to answer two questions central to Aristotle's psychology and biology: why does Aristotle think we have sense-organs, and why does he describe the sense-organs in the way he does? The author looks at all the Aristotelian evidence for the five senses and shows how pervasively Aristotle's accounts of the sense-organs are motivated by his interest in form and function. The book also engages with the celebrated problem (...) of whether perception for Aristotle requires material changes in the perceiver. It argues that, surprisingly to the modern philosopher, nothing in Aristotle's description of the sense-organs requires us to believe in such changes. (shrink)

The paper discusses the active part in the process of perceiving, usually expressed by the Greek word krinein. It is argued that krinein in one of its uses means "to judge" in the sense of judging a case, i. e. deciding it. It is not used for making statements. A second meaning of the Greek word is that of discerning or discriminating, and it is this meaning that plays a central part in Aristotle's theory of perception.

This paper elucidates Aristotle’s conception of thinking in two stages. First, the paper examines the passages in which Aristotle criticizes his Presocratic predecessors for failing to understand what thinking is. The examination shows that Aristotle took his earlier predecessors to assimilate thinking to being sensible and both to perceiving , largely because they do not realize that thinking has a distinctive feature which makes it radically different from both being sensible and perceiving. Second, the paper examines the passages in which (...) Aristotle explains what the distinctive feature of thinking is. It is shown that the distinctive feature of thinking is that it is discriminative of intelligible features, and these are unchanging items of reality inaccessible to senses, called ‘forms’ or ‘universals’. The upshot of the paper is that Aristotle, in contrast to Plato, does not believe that we are born with the ability to think, but rather that we acquire it in the course of our cognitive development. (shrink)