" Three German Commentators on the Individual Senses and the Common Sense in Aristotle's Psychology"

Abstract

This paper is undoubtedly pedantic but the point at issue is important for the understanding of Aristotle's psychological writings. It is that the De Anima is an incomplete and immature working-out of Aristotle's views on sense perception, whereas Aristotle's matured and crystallized views on this subject are to be sought in the Parva Naturalia, particularly in the De Memoria, De Somno, and De Insomniis. This is a long point and has been argued elsewhere.' fulcrum of that argument turned on showing that as we read from the De Anima through the Parva Naturalia we note a development in the notion of the common sense, and see the rise of a more sophisticated and adequate outlook on the relation between the individual senses and the common sense. Here I wish to bolster that argument by giving an account of a discussion that took place among three German scholars in the latter part of the 19th century. Their discussion, detailed and keen in its way, illustrates the frustrations and contradictions awaiting anyone who accepts the De Anima as Aristotle's final word on the nature of the senses. In conclusion I will indicate how their apparently insoluble difficulties disappear when the viewpoint we propose is embraced. discussion was initiated by Herman Schell in 1873 in a book entitled Die Einheit des Seelenslebens aus den Principien der Aristotelischen Philosophie Entwickelt. As the title suggests, Schell maintained that the primary or common sense is the only genuine sense faculty, the individual senses being aspects or functions of it. A few years later in 1877 C. Baeumker's Des Aristoteles Lehre von den dussern und innern Sinnesvermogen appeared in which he criticizes Schell and claims that the individual senses are distinct from the primary sense and are seated in the external organs of the eye, ear etc. A year later in 1878 J. Neushauser published his volume on Aristoteles' Lehre von dem Sinnijchen I See The Order of Aristotle's Psychological Writings, American Journal of Philology, Jan. 1961.