Man As A Being Of Sense And Perception

Buddhist philosophy of Anicca (impermanence), Dukkha (suffering), and

This book is a philosophical analysis of Plotinus' views on sense-perception. It aims to show how his thoughts were both original and a development of the ideas of his predecessors, in particular those of Plato, Aristotle and the Peripatetics. Special attention is paid to Plotinus' dualism with respect to soul and body and its implications for his views on the senses. The author combines a historical approach to his subject, setting Plotinus' thought in the context of thinkers who preceded and succeeded him, with a proper analysis of his ideas and, where appropriate, of those from which they derived.

Anthony J. Lisska presents a new analysis of Thomas Aquinas's theory of perception. Approaching the subject from contemporary analytic philosophy, Lisska argues for the importance of inner sense, and suggests a modest 'innate' or 'structured' interpretation for the role of the crucial faculty of vis cogitativa.

Simplicius and Priscian were two of the seven Neoplatonists who left Athens when the Christian Emperor Justinian closed the paganschool there in A.D. 529. The commentaries ascribed to them on works on sense-perception, one by Aristotle and one by his successor Theophrastus, are translated here in this single volume. Both commentaries give a highly Neoplatonic reading to their Aristotelian subjects and tell us much about late Neoplatonist psychology. This volume is also designed to enable readers to assess a recent major controversy: it has been argued by Carlos Steel and Fernand Bossier that the commentary ascribed to Simplicius is in fact by Priscian, and their article, hitherto only available in Dutch, is here published in revised form and in English for the first time. This book therefore contains all the evidence necessary for readers to judge this intriguing question for themselves.

In his work On Sense Perception, Aristotle discusses the material conditions of perception, starting with the sense organs and moving to the material basis of colour, flavour and odour. His Pythagorean account of hues as a ratio of dark to light was enthusiastically endorsed by Goethe against Newton as being true to the painter's experience. Aristotle finishes with three problems about continuity. First, in what sense are indefinitely small colour patches or colour variations perceptible? Secondly, which perceptible leap discontinuously like light to fill a whole space, which have to reach one point before another; and do observers of the latter perceive the same thing if they are at different distances? Thirdly, how does the central sense permit genuinely simultaneous, rather than staggered, perception of different objects? Alexander's highly explanatory commentary is most expansive on these problems of continuity. His battery of objections to vision involving travel, which would lead to collisions and interference by winds, inspired a tradition of grading the five senses in respect of degrees of immateriality and of intentionality. He also introduces us to paradoxes of Diodorus Cronus about the relations of the smallest perceptible to the largest perceptible size.