Miira Tuominen

Receptive Reason: Alexander of Aphrodisias on Material Intellect

According to Alexander of Aphrodisias, our potential intellect is a purely receptive capacity. Alexander also claims that, in order for us to actualise our intellectual potentiality, the intellect needs to abstract what is intelligible from enmattered perceptible objects. Now a problem emerges: How is it possible for a purely receptive capacity to perform such an abstraction? It will be argued that even though Alexander’s reaction to this question causes some tension in his theory, the philosophical motivation for it is a sound one. Rather than a calculation of actualities and potentialities, the doctrine of receptivity is supposed to explain how human beings come to grasp universal aspects of reality in an accurate manner.

Common Sense and phantasia in Antiquity

Questions concerning the scope, content, and richness of perceptual cognition were widely debated in the ancient philosophical schools. More specific problems related to this theme arose from recognition of the obvious fact that the senses alone are insufficient for explaining the variety of human and animal cognition. Whether or not all such cognition should be ascribed to reason was a matter of debate. Most importantly, opinions diverged with respect to the following questions. Do we have perceptual reflexive cognition, that is, do we perceive that we perceive, or is reflexivity an essentially rational capacity? How can the unity of perceptual cognition be explained in light of the fact that the senses are separate from each other and have unique objects of their own? In a similar vein, if the proper objects of the senses are qualities (for example, flavours are the proper objects of taste), can we perceive things at all? Further, how can absent objects be present to the perceptual soul? To simplify, Aristotle and the Aristotelians were more willing to attribute these cognitive functions to the perceptual soul (2–5), whereas Plato and the Platonists tended to ascribe them to reason (for example, 4–5, see also the section on perception above). In the Aristotelian tradition, reflexive perception and the unity of perceptual cognition were explained by reference to the so-called ‘common sense’ (koinē aisthēsis) (1–2, 5–8), whereas the presence of absent objects to the perceptual soul was attributed to a capacity called phantasia (9–13).

Introduction: Aristotelian Challenges to Contemporary Philosophy—Nature, Knowledge, and the Good

New Perspectives on Aristotelianism and Its Critics traces Aristotelian influences in modern and pre-modern discourses on knowledge, rights, and the good life. The contributions offer new insights on contemporary discussions on life in its cognitive, political, and ethical dimensions.

Ancient Theories of Reasoning

In this section, the central question is whether we can find ancient discussions concerning what happens in the mind when a conclusion is drawn. Did ancient authors suppose that there is a psychological force that compels us to accept the conclusion when the premises are accepted and the inference is valid? Or, if the inference is not deductively valid but adds to the credibility of the conclusion in another way, e.g., by being inductive, what happens in the mind when such an inference is drawn? In general, psychology of reasoning was not a vital topic in antiquity. Reasoning was typically considered from a logical, not from a psychological point of view. For example, in Stoic sources the necessity by which the conclusion follows from the premises is described in terms of the truth conditions of a conditional; no psychological force is postulated. However, some ancient authors made passing remarks here and there which seem to imply that we are somehow forced to draw a conclusion if the inference is valid. Whether this force is psychological or not, was not specified. In a similar vein, we can also ask what happens in the mind when we reason falsely. This was not a prominent topic either, but we find Aristotle’s passing remark that in language-based fallacies we mix the things with their symbols in language (2).

Ancient Theories of Intellection

Ancient philosophical schools shared the view that, in addition to perceptual capacities, human beings have reason. It was also generally supposed that reason is not to be understood solely as a capacity of inference, but that it must also have content (1). Such content was often taken to be general: as opposed to perception which deals with particulars, reasoning operates with general or universal features of reality. However, views diverged as to how or whether such contents are acquired and whether they rather pre-exist in the soul. Whereas the view according to which intelligible forms can be grasped by human reason was wide-spread in the Platonic-Aristotelian tradition, Hellenistic philosophers did not accept the metaphysics of forms and thus also had different views on the objects of reason.