abstract: A widespread view has it that, for Aristotle, perception's psychological and physiological aspects are phenomenal consciousness and its underlying material basis. I argue on the contrary that they are judgment/discrimination and receptivity: in virtue of our sense organs, we are receptive to objects of perception; in virtue of our souls, we judge or discriminate these objects. In effect, Aristotle divides perception's active and passive aspects between soul and body. I defend this view with special attention to Aristotle's claim that our senses receive form without matter in perception.

abstract: Averroes argues for a single, eternal intellect that all humans share. But if that intellect contains all the intelligibles eternally in act, how can it receive from human images what it already has ? How can temporal acts of abstraction generate supposedly eternal intelligibles? I sketch two solutions : (i) a new reading, which holds that intelligibles are generated and corrupted in the separate intellect ; and (ii) another reading that holds (more traditionally) that the intelligibles exist eternally, yet depend perpetually on abstraction. Though I argue for (i), both interpretations resolve the problems and are clarified by Averroes’s notion of intermediate eternality, revealing an important connection between his psychology and cosmology.