Abstract

Recent scholarship in the field of the Aristotelian theory of perception has been influenced, if not dominated, by the opposition to a thesis tentatively put forward by Myles Burnyeat,” in Martha C. Nussbaum and Amélie O. Rorty, Essays on Aristotle’s De Anima [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992], 15–26). Following Burnyeat’s own usage, Everson refers to that reading as “spiritual” and the view opposed to it as “literalist.” Aristotle describes perception as the reception of the form of the sensible without its matter, but he also tells us that in perception the sense organ becomes “like” the sensible. A “spiritualist” interpreter will stress the former description at the expense of the latter: perception is just the actualization of the perceiver’s capacity, without involving any material change. A “literalist,” on the other hand, will stress the many passages in which Aristotle does indeed speak of the material changes involved in perception: the watery stuff that is the eye in fact becomes red when it perceives the proper sensible, red. In this careful and detailed work, Everson provides what he considers a definitive defense of the literalist position. At the same time, where Burnyeat had answered in the negative the question “Is Aristotle’s philosophy of mind still credible?” Everson is attempting to show that much in that philosophy is still credible, and, in part at least, illuminating for our contemporary philosohical problems.