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Perception in Aristotle

This welcome book has three parts, sandwiched by an introduction and conclusion, and a useful appendix printing the crucial texts with critical apparatus. The Introduction tells a relatively familiar story about Plato and Aristotle’s respective solutions to ‘the wooden horse scenario’ of Plato’s Theaetetus, where the individual senses are depicted as autonomous subjects, each with its own phenomenal world but housed alongside the others in a wooden, and so insensate, horse: Plato seeks to account for the unity of consciousness by ‘expand[ing] thought at the expense of perception’ while Aristotle – because he wants to give a systematic account of animal life in general – does the reverse (pp. 5–6). The product of Aristotle’s expansion is, according to G., a perceptual power that emerges from the way in which the individual senses are uniμed in what he calls the perceptual capacity of soul. This power is G.’s titular common sense and the subject of the third and most rewarding part of the book, where a chapter is devoted to each of its main functions. But there is no chapter on the one function that almost all commentators ascribe to it, namely the perception of common perceptibles, like magnitude and motion, which (unlike special perceptibles, such as colours and sounds) can be perceived by more than one individual sense. G. seeks above all to buck this tradition. He begins in Part 1 by presenting a criterion for distinguishing capacities (or conceptually distinct parts) of the soul, a criterion according to which the perceptual capacity is distinct from the imaginative capacity and the two together constitute what G. calls ‘the sensory capacity’: there is one capacity for each salient activity or set of closely related activities. But this criterion, which G. applies at various levels, treats all intra-psychic unities in the same way: the unity of the nutritive–reproductive part of an individual soul with its perceptual part is not distinguished from the unity of the individual senses with one another or of the perceptual with the imaginative part. For the relevance of such an undi¶erentiated notion of ‘conceptually distinct part’ to securing the sort of unity of consciousness needed to avoid the wooden horse scenario is not entirely clear. More importantly, G. does not deal as directly as he should with the nature of the sameness that Aristotle explicitly ascribes to to phantastikon and to aisthêtikon at 459a15–17. Were he to admit what Aristotle calls ‘the sameness but di¶erence in being’ of these capacities, G.’s argument for the distinctness of these from what he calls ‘the sensory capacity’ would be undermined, but with results I think G. should welcome. Let me explain.