The chapter develops the question (raised in Chapter 4) about the precise way in which soul is supposed to play the role of the primary explanans of perception. It does so by bringing out the key difficulty that Aristotle faces and by analysing the three possible answers to this difficulty. The problem is that Aristotle seems to commit himself to three jointly inconsistent tenets: (i) the perceptive soul is the primary cause of perception; (ii) perception is passive; and (iii) the perceptive soul is impassive. These claims are inconsistent if it is true that (iv) there is no way for the soul of being the primary cause of φ-ing other than being the proper subject of whatever φ-ing consists in. Two dominant ways of resolving this problem, since antiquity, consist in denying Aristotle’s commitment to either (ii) or (iii). I argue that difficulties, both exegetical and philosophical, faced by each of these strategies are insurmountable. The third possible strategy starts from denying (iv). I trace such a strategy to the medieval idea of a sensus agens and argue that although the existing medieval (and later) versions cannot stand as such, the third strategy is nevertheless the most promising one.

The chapter explores how Aristotle wants to account for perception’s essentially receptive nature. It focuses on Aristotle’s commitment to the passivity of perception, namely, the idea that perception is a certain kind of being affected (paskhein) by perceptual objects. It provides a classification and preliminary critical analysis of existing interpretations of the passivity of perception. I argue that Aristotle’s first general account of perception in An. 2.5 is systematically pre-causal in the sense that makes it impossible to directly infer from it anything specific about the respective roles of the body and the soul (against both Material and Psychic Interpretation). Furthermore, I contend that Aristotle develops a robust conception of passivity here that successfully encapsulates, on the most general level, what perception is (against Deflationary and Aporetic Interpretation). More specifically, I argue that An. 2.5 is centrally aimed at reconciling perception’s passivity and completeness (the perceiver has both seen and is seeing the same object) and that this task is motivated by the need for capturing the difference between genuine (‘continued’) perceiving and mere appearance within an assimilation model of perception.

Despite widespread and well-reasoned objections to its methods, originalism has gained widespread prominence as the au courant doctrine of legal interpretation. This chapter offers a rhetorical analysis of originalism’s ethos – namely its communal indwelling rooted in rule of law and American democratic values – to explain its strange persistence as well as provide a critical starting point for developing effective critical interventions in future jurisprudential debates about the merits of originalism as a theory of legal meaning. Drawing from Martin Heidegger’s theorizing of ethos, the chapter reconceptualizes ethos and recovers its full meaning beyond good character and wisdom. The chapter situates this full meaning within the emergence of modern originalism as represented in the work of Professor Raoul Berger and then traces the meaning’s evolution through the work of Justice Antonin Scalia and Professor Larry Solum, who both rely on the ethos of indwelling to overcome originalism’s deficiencies rather than their perceived ethos of personal character and effective reasoning. The chapter demonstrates that it was Berger, Scalia, and Solum’s ability to connect their work to a deep-seated shared sense of communal identity that enabled them to secure a place of pride for originalism in jurisprudential debates.

The chapter starts by outlining the version of direct realism endorsed by Aristotle. I argue that he was committed to uncompromised realism about perceptible qualities and to the view that we immediately perceive the bearers of these qualities without any need of further synthetic acts. These features highlight the difficulty of capturing the explanantia of perception. Two notions key to that endeavour are those of mediation and discrimination. The chapter provides a novel analysis of mediation (for discrimination, see Chapter 6), arguing that, for Aristotle, media are – more or less perfect – qualitative conductors. Furthermore, the chapter addresses the existing debate about what, according to Aristotle, happens in the sense organs when we perceive. I argue that the dilemma governing this debate between spiritualism and materialism (either ‘literalist’ or ‘analogical’) is a false one. Tertium datur, and this alternative turns out to be precisely the view Aristotle embraced: perception consists of a thoroughly material process, but what this process results in must not be a standing material likeness (which would mark the end of perception because like cannot be affected by like), but a dynamic ‘phenomenal’ likeness – the presence of a quality of the perceived object which remains to be precisely a quality of that object.

The chapter provides a novel account of perceptual discrimination (krinein) in Aristotle. Against the widespread view that the most basic perceptual acts consist in noticing differences between two or more perceived qualities, I argue that discrimination is for Aristotle more like sifting, winnowing on a sieve: it consists in identifying – with an ultimate authority – the quality of an external object as distinct from any other quality of the given range that the object could have. The chapter further explores how the notion of discrimination is embedded by Aristotle within his causal assimilation model of perception. I argue that the central notion of a discriminative mean (mesotēs), introduced in An. 2.11, is intended to capture the role of the perceptive soul as the controlling factor of a homeostatic mechanism underlying perception. As such the notion lays the groundwork for resolving the apparent conflict between the passivity of perception and the impassivity of the soul (as analysed in Chapter 5). The prospect is further explored in Chapter 7. The present chapter concludes by arguing that Aristotle conceives perceptual discrimination as a holistic assessment of the external object acting on the perceiver, including those of its features which are not causally efficacious.

The chapter spells out the homeostatic model of how the soul is involved in perception introduced in Chapter 6, while addressing two main challenges for it. First, I argue that while the physiological details are not easy to tease out, there is no principal reason against Aristotle’s extension of the model from touch to other sense modalities. More importantly, I argue that we can understand the role of the perceptive soul as an extension of the model developed for the nutritive soul in An. 2.4 and based on Aristotle’s art analogy (from Phys. 2 and elsewhere). The upshot is that the basic perceptual acts are underlaid by bodily processes non-cognitively controlled by the soul. But while homeostasis is the aim of nutrition, in perception it only becomes a means for achieving something else, namely discrimination. The chapter closes by showing how the interpretation developed in this book pays off when it comes to understanding Aristotle’s two notoriously difficult concluding accounts: the account of perception as a reception of forms without the matter in An. 2.12 and the summarizing account of the cognitive soul in An. 3.8.

The chapter sheds fresh light on Aristotle’s account of perception by providing a novel analysis of the puzzles that he articulates within his discussion of the predecessors’ views, especially in An. 1. I argue that Aristotle takes the key insight of the traditional view that like is perceived by like to be expressed in the idea that the perceiver is like the perceptual object by which she is being affected. This idea seems inconsistent with the widely shared assumption that only unlike things can act upon each other. Aristotle’s predecessors were unable to resolve this tension (the notion of a generic likeness is of no help), but he believes that precisely this tension must be resolved by any successful account of what perception is. The only predecessor who at least hinted towards a resolution is Anaxagoras with his account of impassive nous (understood by Aristotle as a general account of cognition). But Anaxagoras failed to account for the causal aspects of cognition as a way of being affected by its object. Aristotle’s own account can be seen as an attempt to incorporate the true insights of both the view that in perception like is affected by like and the view that what perceives must be impassive.

The chapter provides a novel detailed analysis of one of the most discussed chapters in the Aristotelian corpus, namely An. 2.5. The central claim is that in An. 2.5 Aristotle lays down his programmatic definition of perception as a complete passive activity. He does so by classing the perceptive capacity with capacities that are already fulfilments (entelekheiai) of their subjects and by showing how this classification is compatible with perception being passive (i.e. a kind of being affected). By working out the concept of complete passive activity Aristotle fills in a conceptual gap left open elsewhere in the corpus (most strikingly in Metaphysics Θ.6), where both completeness and passivity are taken for granted but without showing how the two features can cohere. In An. 2.5, Aristotle, thus, succeeds in capturing how perception differs not only from manifestations of non-passive complete capacities (such as the art of house-building), but also from passive processes (as exhibited in the inexhaustibility of the perceptive capacity and the object-directedness of perception). His definition is programmatic in the sense that it analyses the explananda without, however, yet providing any explanantia.

The Conclusion sums up the main results of the study and their philosophical relevance. It focuses on the notion of complete passive activities; Aristotle’s integration of causal, qualitative, and relational features of perception; his dynamic account of perception, which defies the standard dichotomy between materialism and spiritualism; the central dilemma for Aristotle’s endeavour to explain perception, as well as the prospects of the homeostatic solution; and finally the promise of the present study to also provide the groundwork for a better understanding of Aristotle’s account of intellectual cognition.

The Introduction articulates the central question about the nature of perception and sets it within the explanatory project of Aristotle’s De Anima. What makes Aristotle’s account attractive, I argue, is that it strives to accommodate causal, qualitative, and relational features of perception. A central insight of Aristotle’s account is captured under the notion of perception as a complete passive activity, but that notion has, since late antiquity, appeared paradoxical to readers of De Anima and was, thus, systematically disregarded. The Introduction analyses the historical and philosophical reasons for this disregard. It further articulates the key dilemma pertaining to Aristotle’s view of the role played in perception by the soul: it should be the primary cause of an essentially passive and receptive activity, but it should itself remain unmoved and impassive; how can that be? Although this question has received relatively little attention among recent scholars, it is argued to be more crucial than the much-discussed issue of what happens in the perceiver’s sense organs. The final section of the Introduction outlines the argument of the entire book.

This chapter returns to the conception of philosophy as the thought of the illimitable object from which Marx began. It then considers how, in the here and now, the actualization of philosophy can be conceived as the actualization of a resurgent absolute idealism. This actualization shows the question of the ‘applicability’ of philosophy to the world to be misplaced: philosophy, being human thought as such, and philosophy actualized the actualization of that, our human thinking life is already its own application to the ‘real’ world. This is brought out by considering that there are, in and around us, pockets of communism—actual, not merely potential.

This chapter examines the unstable intellectual situation of Marx’s Paris Manuscripts, in which an abstract conception of the Hegelian subject–object that had allegedly been naturalized by Feuerbach into the pair human–nature jostles, on the one hand, with a recognition on Marx’s part of a historical dimension lacking in Feuerbach but which had already been present in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and, on the other, with an emerging familiarity with radical politics. Marx’s conception of the human as Gattungswesen, the basis of a communism that as fully developed naturalism equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism, is still indebted to that of Feuerbach. At the same time, he is developing his own conception of the human that resolutely carries Aristotle’s theory of soul through into the case of rational soul where Aristotle himself suffered a failure of nerve.

The introduction describes the scholastic Latin debate over the relation between the soul and its powers in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century. It shows that this debate concerned the question of how a living being’s natural kind, which is determined by its soul, and its kind-specific powers are related. Is a living being’s soul the very same thing as its kind-specific powers, or is its soul perhaps something more basic upon which its kind-specific powers depend? The introduction shows that there were two overarching answers to this question in the thirteenth and fourteenth century: the identity theory, according to which the soul and its powers are identical, and the distinction theory, according to which the soul is distinct from its powers. The introduction first highlights that the debate between identity and distinction theorists already arose in the twelfth century in response to Augustine’s doctrine of the image of the Trinity. It then traces, in broad strokes, the development of the debate from the twelfth century until 1250. Finally, it discusses the phase between 1250 and 1320 focusing on the reception of Aristotle’s theory of the soul in the Latin West.

This text of Bonaventure’s gives a nice indication of how Aristotle begins to influence the debate about the relation between the soul and its powers in the Latin West around the 1250s. In this text, Bonaventure is still very much in dialogue with the earlier debate. He recounts the early twelfth-century identity theory and earlier versions of the distinction theory, and he argues in favor of the version of the distinction theory defended by early Franciscans like Alexander of Hales. As Bonaventure states this latter theory, the soul and its powers are one “in substance” but differ “in essence”, the essential difference having to do with the fact that the powers of the soul, unlike the soul itself, are relations. But Bonaventure also introduces a philosophical innovation into this theory—one that draws on Aristotle. He argues that the powers of the soul, despite being relations, are special types of substances, namely, substances “by a tracing back” (per reductionem). He understands by “substances by a tracing back” imperfect occupants of the category of substance.

Throughout this book, we have suggested that the notion of choruses offers a metaphor through which these diverse collectives can be understood. Granted, this metaphor is not a typical concept that historians ordinarily use to describe community life, such as the association or the network, which seem at first sight to offer a more stable descriptive framework. We nevertheless argue that the choral reference makes it possible to obtain fine-grained knowledge of the modulations of the Athenian city in 404/3, since it is anchored in Greek thought and social practices. Indeed, viewed through the lens of chorality, the Athenian community landscape appears in a new light, defined by plurality and contingency. Legal status is no longer a fixed barrier assigning place to individuals once and for all: Divergent temporalities constantly overlap and weave together the polyrhythmic fabric of the city. The question that guides the whole of our investigation is ultimately about the choral essence of the city. Is it possible to see the Athenian polis, and all the groups of which it is composed, as a choral song? Illustrating the scope of the Athenian social space does not consist only in describing its polyphony, but also in listening to the harmonics, be they consonant or dissonant, which cut across it.