The Ontological Entailments of Averroes’ Understanding of Perception

Abstract

Averroes (1126–1198) is the foremost medieval commentator on Aristotle. As such, his thoughts on perception are found in a number of his writings, particularly in his commentaries on the Parva naturalia1 and the De anima. Helmut Gatje, Harry Wolfson and others have studied Averroes’ views on this subject,2 and they have located him within the Islamic philosophical tradition of his predecessors. As these studies have shown, “perception” is a term that bridges three activities of the soul: the sensation that the senses experience, and the imaginative and intellectual apprehensions subsequent to that sensation. Perception thus involves various faculties of the soul as then conceived: the sense organs, the common sense, the imaginative faculty, the cogitative faculty,3 memory, and the rational faculty. The path that leads from sensation to cognition has a guiding hand, an external agency that Averroes understood as part of the Peripatetic tradition, though its origins lay with Alexander of Aphrodisias. It was he who elevated Aristotle’s immanent active principle of intellection to a transcendent sphere, equivalent to that of other