Public Lecture: "Essence and Explanation in Aristotle's Theory of Perception"

CPAS Colloquium: Professor Sean Kelsey (Notre Dame)

Elsewhere I have tried to bring out how, in Aristotle’s view, many kinds of proceeding owe their being and intelligibility to a kind of affinity or likeness, a community of form, which makes the parties to them be what by nature they are, e.g. friend and friend, feeder and food, agent and patient, and so on. On such a view, the key to understanding such proceedings lies in grasping the form that binds its participants together in a single undertaking, common and natural to them all. In this paper I consider how this way of thinking makes itself felt in Aristotle’s theory of perception.