Over the past few decades Aristotelian scholars have directed significant energies toward the study of the De Anima (DA). One prominent concern in the recent literature takes as its focus Aristotle's treatment of our higher psychic capacities: the capacities by which we judge, namely aisthesis and nous. The main concern has been his position on the relations between the cognitive activities (of perceiving and thinking) and material alteration. The salient question is: does cognitive functioning require the sorts of happenings which we would now describe as physiological changes?1 On this score, consensus has not been reached; neither in respect to perception nor in respect to thought is there agreement on the role of material alteration. In fact, when it comes to perception, the literature has shaken the foundations of a pre-existing state of consensus. Not long ago it had been taken as nearly axiomatic that perceiving, on Aristotle's account, requires material alteration within the organ of perception.2 But recently, one scholar, Myles Burnyeat, has argued that, while the account in the DA shows that perception requires certain static material conditions (for example, a creature must have eyes composed of transparent material in order to have the capacity to see), perceiving does not involve material alteration.3 On this view, when I become perceptually aware of a visible quality, this is not due (even in part) to a material happening of an ordinary type within my eyes and so there are no sufficient physiological conditions for perceiving one quality rather than another (green rather than yellow, etc.). In Burnyeat's own words, the physical material of animal bodies in Aristotle's world is already pregnant with consciousness, needing only to be awakened... (Burnyeat 1992, p.19), there is no physiological process which stands to the awareness of a color or a sound as matter to form. (Burnyeat 1993, p.263). As it stands, those now involved in the debate over the nature of perception fall into two camps: those who think that perception does require material alteration and those who (along with Burnyeat) think that it does not.4 When it comes to the account of thought, we are confronted with a less tidy situation: (1) some suggest that Aristotle is a physicalist or a functionalist about thought, taking it to be somehow realized in material alteration within the body, (2) others suggest that he is a dualist, taking mind or at least the famous productive intellect of DA III.5 to be immaterial and not dependent on the body in any way, and (3) yet others suggest that thought presupposes material alteration as an antecedent causal condition, but that episodes of thought needn't depend on episodes of material alteration.5 These are only a few of the approaches to the account of thought found in the recent literature, but they sufficiently illustrate the variety among contemporary interpretations. In this paper, I would like to sketch my own account of the relation between cognitive activity and material alteration within ...
According to current interpretations of Parmenides, he either embraces a tokenmonism of things, or a type-monism of the nature of each kind of thing, or a generous monism, accepting a token-monism of things of a specific type, necessary being. These interpretations share a common flaw: they fail to secure commensurability between Parmenides' alëtheia and doxa. We effect this by arguing that Parmenides champions a metaphysically refined form of material monism, a type-monism of things; that light and night are allomorphs of what-is (to eon); and that the key features of what-is are entailed by the theory of material monism.
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