Sense experience aristotle biography

Controversies Surrounding Aristotle's Theory of Perception

The most immediate difficulty for Aristotle’s approach to perception concerns his claim that in sense perception the relevant sensory faculty becomes like the object it perceives.

(This claim is reflected in clause (iii) of the general analysis of Aristotelian perception offered in the main article.) When he says that “what can perceive is potentially such as the object of sense is actually” (De Anima ii 5, 418a3–4), Aristotle seems to commit himself to a claim to the effect that a sense organ in one way or another becomes like its object when it perceives.

The difficulty concerns understanding precisely how this likeness is supposed to be envisaged. In the abstract, it is easy to understand this claim in a variety of different ways. An ultimate evaluation of Aristotle’s theory of perception will need first to decide what he intends.

At one end of the spectrum, some commentators have und