José Filipe Silva

Robert Kilwardby on the Human Soul

Robert Kilwardby on the Human Soul examines Kilwardby’s role in conciliating Aristotelian and Augustinian views on the soul, soul-body relation, and cognition. The detailed investigation into Kilwardby’s pluralism of forms sheds new light into the Oxford Prohibitions of 1277.

Augustine on Active Perception

In this chapter I argue that two apparently different accounts of perception in Augustine’s works—the subjective and objective accounts—can be rendered compatible if intentio is understood as the way the soul is present in the body, thus preceding any particular sense experience. In the remaining sections of the chapter, the consequences of this understanding are explored, namely in the context of Augustine’s distinction between bodily and spiritual seeing. It is argued that perception is of external things, not of their inner representations that are automatically formed by the soul and of which we are not immediately aware. Perception requires that this automatically produced sensory imagery be further processed by a higher-level attention with the contribution of the power of memory. The chapter concludes with the suggestion that two senses of intentionality are at play in the Augustinian theory of active perception: ontological intentionality, or intentionality of state, which refers to the soul’s continuous attention to the body; and epistemic intentionality, or intentionality of content, which refers to the perceptual acts as directed to external things and is further divided into lower unconscious and higher conscious intentionality.

Self-Awareness and Perception in Augustinian Epistemology

Traditionally, two claims have been made about Augustinian views on self-knowledge: firstly, that according to Augustine the soul is fully transparent to itself, meaning that it has an unmediated access to its essence; secondly, that medieval Augustinians retained this unmediated access to the essence of the soul by itself, thus opting for a view alternative to authors of an Aristotelian hue for whom the soul knows itself only by means of knowing its acts. In the first part of my paper, I argue that the traditional reading of Augustine is correct with the qualification that such transparency is proper to the human mind, which means that it does not apply to the soul of non-rational animals. Sensory self-awareness in non-rational beings must be understood in the restricted sense of awareness of the state of their sense organs. In the second part of my paper, I investigate how the principle of the soul’s transparency is understood by a sample of late medieval thinkers with the aim of showing that the traditional distinction between Augustinians and Aristotelians on self-knowledge is progressively blurred.

Introduction: The World as a Stereogram

This paper presents the historically most important theories of how visual perception is made spatial in the cognitive processing of the sensory input to the eye. All of them involve active engagement of the mind. Firstly, in the medieval theories physiological processes developed three-dimensional imagery in the brain, and active mental processing was needed to build coherence in the perceptual experience as a whole but not to yield the basic idea of spatiality. Secondly, according to Descartes, the eyes produced a unified two-dimensional visual image that was neurally transmitted to the inner surface of the brain. The innate conception of three-dimensional spatiality was superimposed intellectually on this image and thus all spatial perception involves mental judgment. Thirdly, Berkeley rejected innateness and claimed that the experiential three-dimensionality in vision was due to associating visual ideas to ideas of other senses, among which proprioceptive senses were the most important. Spatiality is thus not due to the basic visual experience itself in any of these three models.

Medieval Theories of Active Perception: An Overview

According to the dominant traditional account of perception in the medieval period, the senses receive the form of an external object, and this reception actualizes the sense power’s potentiality to perceive. Dominant as this Aristotelian account was, it overshadows an alternative way to describe the act of perception that is found in the tradition of medieval Augustinianism. According to this tradition, the object offers the occasion for the soul to form or found in and by itself the images of the object. It is by reacting to the bodily affection caused by the object that the soul becomes aware of the external thing. The theory integrates the causal relation of the Aristotelian account in explaining the interaction between material things—object and sense organ—but denies that this physical causality is the cause of perceptual acts. Here I focus on a strand in this tradition, which understands perception as the result of sense objects acting upon sense organs in such a way as to excite the soul.