Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- COMMENTARY ON DE ANIMA: : Book 1
- COMMENTARY ON DE ANIMA: Book 2
- COMMENTARY ON DE ANIMA: Book 3
- 1 In the World As It Is There Can Be but the Five Senses
- 2 What Allows for Perceiving That We Perceive; Sense Joins in a Common Power so That the Five Senses Are Subfaculties of a Central Sense Faculty
- 3 Distinguishing Sense and Thought; What Is Phantasia?
- 4 What Is Mind as That Capable of Thinking All Things
- 5 What Enables Thinking to Occur
- 6 The Sorts of Intelligible Objects
- 7 Phantasia Has a Role in All Thinking
- 8 That Mind Can Think All Things
- 9 There Is a Capacity for Progressive Motion
- 10 The Desiderative Capacity Is the Primary Cause of Progressive Motion
- 11 Even the Simplest Animals Have Indefinite Phantasia, and Calculative Phantasia Fits the Account of Progressive Motion
- 12 The Necessary Order of the Faculties of Soul
- 13 The Sort of Body Requisite to Support the Order of the Faculties of Soul
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - Distinguishing Sense and Thought; What Is Phantasia?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- COMMENTARY ON DE ANIMA: : Book 1
- COMMENTARY ON DE ANIMA: Book 2
- COMMENTARY ON DE ANIMA: Book 3
- 1 In the World As It Is There Can Be but the Five Senses
- 2 What Allows for Perceiving That We Perceive; Sense Joins in a Common Power so That the Five Senses Are Subfaculties of a Central Sense Faculty
- 3 Distinguishing Sense and Thought; What Is Phantasia?
- 4 What Is Mind as That Capable of Thinking All Things
- 5 What Enables Thinking to Occur
- 6 The Sorts of Intelligible Objects
- 7 Phantasia Has a Role in All Thinking
- 8 That Mind Can Think All Things
- 9 There Is a Capacity for Progressive Motion
- 10 The Desiderative Capacity Is the Primary Cause of Progressive Motion
- 11 Even the Simplest Animals Have Indefinite Phantasia, and Calculative Phantasia Fits the Account of Progressive Motion
- 12 The Necessary Order of the Faculties of Soul
- 13 The Sort of Body Requisite to Support the Order of the Faculties of Soul
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Aristotle has pursued two lines in considering sense perception, that which goes through the five proper senses and their sensible objects, media, and organs, and that which, avoiding duplications by arguing for just five senses and showing that perception of perception and discrimination of objects of the several senses require no additional sense, eventuates in a unification of sense. This latter line of reflection takes sense perception to the limits of its extension so that the realm of sense can be clearly demarcated. There are but five senses, and perception of perception and discrimination of all the objects of sense take place within the realm of sense. Humans generally combine their sense with thought and speech, however, and this makes thought hard to distinguish from sense. Plato may have been the first carefully to distinguish sense (αἴσθησις) from reasoning (συλλογισμός) and opining (δοζάζειν), yet perhaps even Plato was more concerned to disentangle thought from sense than to determine just how far sense can go. It remains, then, for Aristotle to stake out the whole realm of sense, as he has in this work up through iii 2, to prepare to investigate thought. There was little question about the respective turfs of nutrition and sense perception, even if there may be doubt as to whether some simple organisms are plants or animals (see, e.g., HA 588b4–589a9 and PA 681a15–b13).
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- Information
- Aristotle's De AnimaA Critical Commentary, pp. 403 - 433Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007