Aristotle on conceptual awareness of sensory experiences
Part of : Philosophical inquiry ; Vol.XXVI, No.4, 2004, pages 27-44
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27-44
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It is not an uncommon view that perception is an active, discriminative process, according to Aristotle. One becomes aware of one’s sensations in the discriminative activity of senses. This type of awareness is not, however, sufficient to explicate perceptual awareness in all respects. Such a conception of perceptual awareness does not, for example, explain the relation of percepts to concepts, an important element of awareness. Moreover, if perception simply consists of discrimination of sensory qualities, to account for perceptual awareness of humans as different from that of animals becomes highly difficult. In this paper, I argue that Aristotle has a notion of perceptual awareness that goes beyond mere discrimination of sensory qualities. Particularly, I argue that recollection as a function of the primary faculty of sense-perception is the distinctive feature of human perception for Aristotle. By means of recollection, one becomes conceptually aware of one’s sensory experiences.
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Περιέχει σημειώσεις και βιβλιογραφία
