Aristotle on Perceiving Objects

A discussion of Anna Marmodoro's book Anna Marmodoro (Fellow in
Philosophy, Corpus Christi, University of Oxford) discusses her
book Aristotle on Perceiving Objects with Ophelia Deroy (Associate
Director, Institute of Philosophy, School of Advanced Study and
Senior Researcher, Centre for the Study of the Senses), Richard
Sorabji (Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, King's College London)
and Rowland Stout (Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Oxford and
Professor of Philosophy, University College Dublin). About the
book: How can we explain the structure of perceptual experience?
What is it that we perceive? How is it that we perceive objects and
not disjoint arrays of properties? By which sense or senses do we
perceive objects? Are our five senses sufficient for the perception
of objects? Aristotle investigated these questions by means of the
metaphysical modeling of the unity of the perceptual faculty and
the unity of experiential content. His account remains fruitful-but
also challenging-even for contemporary philosophy. This book offers
a reconstruction of the six metaphysical models Aristotle offered
to address these and related questions, focusing on their
metaphysical underpinning in his theory of causal powers. By doing
so, the book brings out what is especially valuable and even
surprising about the topic: the core principles of Aristotle's
metaphysics of perception are fundamentally different from those of
his metaphysics of substance. Yet, for precisely this reason, his
models of perceptual content are unexplored territory. This book
breaks new ground in offering an understanding of Aristotle's
metaphysics of the content of perceptual experience and of the
composition of the perceptual faculty.