Aristotle on Perceiving Objects by Anna Marmodoro (review)

The study of Aristotle’s psychology has long been dominated by metaphysical concerns, centering above all on the relation between the soul and the body. For centuries, this was inevitable, given the widespread preoccupation with immortality and considerable puzzlement as to whether Aristotle’s views about the intellect committed him to it or not. But in the twentieth century the soul-body relation has continued to be the main focus, even when talking about perception. The debate over perception that raged from the 1980s until the last decade was almost entirely restricted to the question of whether Aristotle was a functionalist.

It is a welcome change, then, to have a book whose primary concern is the content of perception. There are many questions worth pursuing here that have not received sufficient attention in the literature: for example, does perception have content for Aristotle and, if so, of what sort? Is it propositional? Is there only conceptual content or does he allow for a kind of nonconceptual content? And others as well. Although Marmodoro initially sets her scope wide, to describe Aristotle’s account of “the structure of experience” (1), she is in fact predominantly concerned with one specific problem: how we can perceive ordinary objects as such, despite their possessing perceptible qualities that belong to different sense modalities. She approaches this question effectively in two stages: first, by asking to what extent and in what way perceptible objects determine the content of perception on Aristotle’s theory (chapters 1–3), and second how cross-modal binding is possible (chapters 4–8). To answer the first she looks closely at Aristotle’s causal theory of perception, above all in De Anima 3.2; and for the second at his views on the “common sense” and his repeated discussions of what is required to distinguish perceptible qualities from different modalities. She takes issue with Pavel Gregoric’s Aristotle on the Common Sense (OUP, 2007), in particular by arguing more “robustly” that the common sense has powers “over and above” those of the special senses that constitute it and which cannot be reduced to them (200–205).

Once the issues are framed in this way, though, it should come as no surprise that Marmodoro’s approach is resolutely metaphysical: her arguments hinge almost entirely on the individuation of events, the nature of powers, identity conditions, sameness and difference, how unity is achieved in various multiplicities. This emphasis is natural enough, and indeed justified, since Aristotle’s discussions of the causal interaction between perceiver and perceived, and the unification of the special senses, are carried out largely in metaphysical terms. But the question here that is never fully addressed is whether these considerations are sufficient to determine answers about content and awareness. I think they can, but only up to a point. For example, Aristotle makes clear why the question of unity is relevant to multimodal discrimination: a single subject must be aware of two different qualities, yet each can only be intrinsically perceived by distinct special senses. A solution to this problem is necessary for cross-modal binding to be possible, and in chapters 6–8 Marmodoro examines six different solutions she finds in Aristotle. But is that enough to explain how we unify the perception of certain qualities into the recognition of an object and not others (as opposed to the unity of perceptual consciousness more globally)? It hardly seems so. If Aristotle has an answer to this, he would have to say much more. A similar point can be made about the “subtle perceptual realism” Marmodoro attributes to Aristotle in chapter 3. She is right to take the passages from Metaphysics 4.5 and De Sensu 6 that she discusses on 135–39 as indicating multiple causal effects from a common cause. But do they say explicitly anything about variation in content, much less subjectivity as she claims (especially as she rejects privacy on 141), or about standard conditions and reliabilism?

I cannot do more than mention some...