Medieval Theories

Abstract

Early medieval Latin discussions of perception were largely influenced by Avicenna’s Liber de anima. His description of the five external senses combined Aristotelian and Galenic medical ideas. Some medical views were also known through the Pantegni of ‘Alī ibn al-‘Abbās al-Mağūsī and the works of Costa ben Luca, Nemesius of Emesa and John Damascene. While Avicenna’s approach also included the Neoplatonic conception of the soul as the active perceiver which uses corporeal instruments, this was not a central theme in his De anima and was rather known through Augustine’s works. Aristotle’s theory became dominant when his De anima was included in the university curriculum in the middle of the thirteenth century. Following Averroes, Latin Aristotle commentators were particularly interested in the nature of the medium change and the reception of the sensory species of the object without matter.

Aristotelian perceptual realism involved the teleological idea that the passive sensory powers and their extra-mental objects constituted a relational whole in which the objective perceptibility of things was actualized when the sensory qualities activated the corresponding sensory powers. This model was somewhat qualified though not refuted by the early fourteenth-century interest in the subjective reception of sensory content and the tendency to combine Aristotle’s view of passive perception with various active elements.