[koglist] invitation to a talk on`Aristotle on Perceptual Content`by Victor Caston - 26 February, 5.30 PM

The CEU Department of Philosophy cordially invites you to a talk (as part of its Departmental Colloquium series) by Victor Caston (University of Michigan) on ` Aristotle on Perceptual Content` Tuesday, 26 February, 2013, 5.30 PM, Zrinyi 14, Room 412 ABSTRACT There is a certain tension in Aristotle’s theories, at least prima facie, between the nature and role of percep­tion. Aristotle gives a prominent role to perception not just in the acquisition of knowledge, but also in the explanation of human action and the behavior of animals more generally. For these purposes, perceptual content needs to be fairly rich. Perception must inform an animal about features of the environment that are significant for it, even animals with a very crude and limited behavioral repertoire. But it is unclear whether his theory of perception has the resources to deliver content of the sort he needs. In the past, scholars have worried whether the causal mechanisms he describes in his psychological works are sufficient to explain anything more than the most basic perception of sensible qualities like col­ors or tones. But before we can tackle this problem, we must answer a prior one, about whether perception essentially involves perceiving something as belonging to a certain kind or perceiving that something is of a certain character. According to the predominant line of interpretation, it does not: perception, for Aristotle, is of particulars and not universals. Consequently, we cannot perceive anything as being of a certain sort without the aid of other faculties that go beyond it (if not conceptual thought, then at least what Aristotle calls phantasia or empeiria). In this paper, I challenge this line of interpretation in various forms and eventually reject it, arguing in­stead that taking an object to be a certain sort of thing is essential to perception as such, in all its forms, for Aristotle. Perception in his theory can be seen to have a de re content, which exhibits both extensional and nonextensional features. It also commits him to a certain view about nonconceptual content as well. On this basis, we can offer more precise reconstructions of the central notions in Aristotle’s theory of perception.