Abstract
The aim of this volume is to contribute to the discussion of the internal senses in the Aristotelian tradition. Since the Aristotelian tradition covers more than 2000 years of interpretation, commentary, criticism and innovation, and since it spans many languages, including Arabic, Greek and Latin, it would be impossible to offer an inclusive and comprehensive account of the internal senses in the Aristotelian tradition. We attempt no such thing in this volume. Our scope is limited to a handful of questions on the existence and identity conditions of the internal senses in their historical contexts and some case studies about particular internal senses, namely compositive imagination/thinking (mutahayyila/mufakkira) and estimation (wahm), on the one hand, and the relationship between memory and the theories of mixtures and motion and the logic of non-existent objects of imagination, on the other hand. The selection of cases has been based on the current research interest of the authors. The chapters are divided into two main parts: I. Central Questions in Their Historical Contexts and II. Case Studies: From Historical and Contemporary Perspectives.
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Notes
- 1.
Explaining other internal sense traditions, apart from the Aristotelian one, goes well beyond the purposes of this volume and, for familiar reasons, cannot be done here. For a thorough introduction to the internal senses in the three dominant linguistic traditions in medieval philosophy, see Harry Austryn Wolfson, ‘The Internal Senses in Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew Philosophic Texts’, Harvard Theological Review 28 (1935), 69–133. For the neo-Platonic tradition of the internal senses and its interaction with the Aristotelian one, see Muhammad U. Faruque, ‘The Internal Senses in Nemesius, Plotinus and Galen: The Beginning of an Idea’, Journal of Ancient Philosophy 10/2 (2016), 119–139. For further references, please see footnote 9 below.
- 2.
For a caveat in this regard, see Michael Frede, ‘Aristotle’s Rationalism’, in Michael Frede and Gisela Striker (eds.), Rationality in Greek Thought (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 157–73. For a mirror image of this issue in the medieval Arabic Aristotelian tradition see, for example, Dimitri Gutas, ‘The Empiricism of Avicenna’ Oriens 40 (2012), 391–436.
- 3.
See Pavel Gregorić, Aristotle on the Common Sense (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
- 4.
See Mika Perälä, ‘Aristotle on Incidental Perception’, in Juhana Toivanen and Christina T. Thörnqvist (eds.), Sense Perception in the Aristotelian Tradition (in preparation).
- 5.
Arist., Somn.Vig. 2, 456a20–21: “… κινεῖται δὲ πᾶν αἰσθήσεώς τινος γενομένης, ἢ οἰκείας ἢ ἀλλοτρίας, ἐν τῷ πρώτῳ αἰσθητηρίῳ.”
- 6.
Arist. De insomniis 3, 460b28–33: “… φανερὸν ὅτι οὐ μόνον ἐγρηγορότων αἱ κινήσεις αἱ ἀπὸ τῶν αἰσθημάτων γινόμεναι τῶν τε θύραθεν καὶ τῶν ἐκ τοῦ σώματος ἐνυπάρχουσιν, ἀλλὰ καὶ ὅταν γένηται τὸ πάθος τοῦτο ὃ καλεῖται ὕπνος, καὶ μᾶλλον τότε φαίνονται.”
- 7.
See P. Gregorić, Aristotle on the Common Sense (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 124–25. We would like to thank Pavel Gregorić for this point.
- 8.
Gregorić’s contribution is a slightly revised version of: Pavel Gregorić, “Alexander of Aphrodisias on the Common Sense”, Filozofski vestnik 38/1 (2017), 47–64. We would like to thank the editors of Filozofski vestnik for granting us permission to reprint the paper in this volume.
- 9.
See Harry Austryn Wolfson, ‘The Internal Senses in Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew Philosophic Texts’, Harvard Theological Review 28 (1935), 69–133; E. Ruth Harvey, The Inward Wits: Psychological Theory in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Warburg Institute Surveys, vol. 6 (London: The Warburg Institute, 1975); Gotthard Strohmaier, ‘Avicennas Lehre von den “inneren Sinnen” und ihre Voraussetzungen bei Galen’, in Paola Manuli and Mario Vegetti (eds.), Le opere psicologiche di Galeno, Elenchos, vol. 13 (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1988), 231–42; Simon Kemp and Garth J. O. Fletcher, ‘The Medieval Theory of the Inner Senses’, American Journal of Psychology 106 (1993), 559–76; Juhana Toivanen, Perception and the Internal Senses: Peter of John Olivi on the Cognitive Functions of the Sensitive Soul (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 225–65; Simo Knuuttila and Pekka Kärkkäinen, ‘Medieval Theories of Internal Senses’ in Simo Knuuttila and Juha Sihvola (eds.), Sourcebook for the History of the Philosophy of Mind (Springer, 2014), 131–147; Lorenzo Casini, ‘Renaissance Theories of Internal Senses’ in Simo Knuuttila and Juha Sihvola (eds.), Sourcebook for the History of the Philosophy of Mind (Springer, 2014), 147–157; Rotraud Hansberger, ‘Averroes and the “Internal Senses”’, in Peter Adamson and Matteo Di Giovanni (eds.), Interpreting Averroes: Critical Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 138–57.
- 10.
See, for example, Augustine, De libero arbitrio 2.3.8-9.
- 11.
See Avicenna’s De Anima (Arabic Text): Being the Psychological part of Kitāb al-Shifā’, ed. F. Rahman (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), Chapter IV, 163–201, and also Avicenna Latinus, Liber de anima I-II-III, ed. S. van Riet (Louvain and Leiden: Peeters & Brill, 1972), 87.19–91.60.
- 12.
For an insightful discussion of the history of this text in the Latin west see Dag Nikolaus Hasse, Avicenna’s De Anima in the Latin West: The Formation of a Peripatetic Philosophy of the Soul 1160–1300, Warburg Institute Studies & Texts (London: The Warburg Institute, 2001).
- 13.
In his Book of Salvation (Kitāb al-Najāt), Avicenna’s chapter on the “Internal Senses” begins like this: “There are some faculties of internal perception which perceive the form of the sensed things, and others which perceive the “intention” [al-ma’naˉ] thereof” (Avicenna’s Psychology: An English Translation of Kitāb al-Najāt, Book II, Chapter VI, ed. and trans. F. Rahman (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), 30). The translated text is from the Latin translation, Avicenna Latinus, Liber de anima, 83, this reads: “Sed vis apprehendens duplex est: alia enim est vis quae apprehendit a foris, alia quae apprehendit ab intus.”
- 14.
For an account of Avicenna’s view on phantasia see, for example, Deborah Black, ‘Estimation (Wahm) in Avicenna: The Logical and Psychological Dimensions’, Dialogue 32 (1993), 219–258.
- 15.
See Dimitri Gutas, ‘Intuition and thinking: the evolving structure of Avicenna’s epistemology,’ in Robert Wisnowsky (ed.), Aspects of Avicenna (Princeton: Markus Wiener, 2003), 1–38. For a different interpretation, see Deborah Black, ‘Rational Imagination: Avicenna on the Cogitative Power’, in Luis Xavier López-Farjeat and Jörg Alejandro Tellkamp (eds.), Philosophical Psychology in Arabic Thought and the Latin Aristotelianism of the 13th Century (Paris: J. Vrin, 2013), 59–81.
- 16.
See Dag Nikolaus Hasse, ‘Avicenna on Abstraction’, in Robert Wisnovsky (ed.), Aspects of Avicenna (Princeton, 2001), 39–72. For an alternative interpretation see Deborah Black, ‘How do we acquire concepts? Avicenna on abstraction and emanation: essential readings and contemporary responses’, in Jeffrey Hause (ed.), Debates in Medieval Philosophy Essential Readings and Contemporary Responses (New York: Routledge, 2014), 126–45.
- 17.
See Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: multiple personality and the sciences of memory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
- 18.
See, in particular, John Sutton, ‘Language, memory, and concepts of memory: semantic diversity and scientific psychology’, in Mengistu Amberber (ed.), The Language of Memory from a Cross-Linguistic Perspective (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007), 41–65.
- 19.
Graham Priest, Towards Non-Being (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Francesco Berto, Existence as a Real Property (Dordrecht: Synthèse Library, Springer, 2013); Graham Priest, Towards Non-Being, 2nd Extended Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
- 20.
Again, Priest’s claim is not that this is the only way to interpret “ampliation”; rather, what he does here can be seen as bringing in a new perspective on how to understand a problem in the history of philosophy.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank all the participants in the 2016 conference, The Internal Senses in the Aristotelian Tradition, at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and all the members of the research programme Representation and Reality. Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on the Aristotelian Tradition, funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. We are specially indebted to the contributors to this volume for their valuable contributions, cooperation and patience. Also, we are grateful to an anonymous reviewer of this volume for his/her insightful and helpful comments and suggestions.
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Mousavian, S.N., Fink, J.L. (2020). The Internal Senses in Context. In: Mousavian, S., Fink, J. (eds) The Internal Senses in the Aristotelian Tradition. Studies in the History of Philosophy of Mind, vol 22. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33408-6_1
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