Perceiving That We See and Hear in Aristotle’s De Anima III 2

Roberto Grasso

doi:10.11606/issn.1981-9471.v13i1p120-146

Abstract

Perceiving That We See and Hear in Aristotle’s De Anima III 2

Highlights

Aristotle’s treatment of the activity of ‘perceiving that we see and hear’ in DA III 2 (425b12-25) has sparked a complex debate among his commentators
Its central claim is that the passage postulates a particular type of perception, where a certain content F is perceived in the absence of causal interactions between sense organs and perceptible F-objects
Continuing along the same lines, in 425b15-17 Aristotle would add a ‘regress argument’ to corroborate the point: if we insist on the ‘different sense hypothesis’, we should face the necessity of postulating a further sense responsible for ‘perceiving that we perceive that we see’ and so on, ad infinitum; to avoid the regress, we should assume that sight is capable of perceiving itself

Summary

Introduction

Aristotle’s treatment of the activity of ‘perceiving that we see and hear’ in DA III 2 (425b12-25) has sparked a complex debate among his commentators. As I shall argue, Aristotle maintains that the operation of ‘perceiving that we see and hear’ postulates a peculiar type of ‘accidental’ perception, in which some content F is perceived in the absence of a genuinely physical causal interaction with an F-object: in perceiving our own seeing (or hearing), we perceive the abstract content of those mental states, which are just characterized by causally powerless phenomenal properties Since this type of perception does not work according to the type of causal mechanism at play in ‘per se’ instances of perceiving — such as seeing or hearing — we should be wary of describing Aristotle’s ‘perception that we see’ as a higher-order theory of perceptual awareness. Striking similarities with the difference between types of perception introduced by DA III 2’s reflection on how we perceive that we see and hear

The Questions

The Regress

The Type of Perception by Which We Perceive That We See

Conclusion