The chapter ‘Alexander of Aphrodisias on Concepts’ by Frans A. J. de Haas takes up another aspect of concept theory, that is, the endeavour to define what a concept is. Furthermore, he explores the interactions between the Peripatetics and the Stoics, as they are evidenced by Alexander, on ontological as well as psychological and epistemological issues. De Haas also offers a systematic study of part of Alexander’s rich vocabulary denoting concepts, thoughts, and universals, and of a correspondingly rich collection of verbs referring to the human activities of abstracting or constructing concepts. Importantly, this analysis sheds light on Alexander’s understanding of ennoia and noêma, and on Alexander’s views concerning the epistemic reliability of concepts and the unity of concepts in the human soul.

This is a close scrutiny of De Anima II.5, led by two questions. First, what can be learned from so long and intricate a discussion about the neglected problem of how to read an Aristotelian chapter? Second, what can the chapter, properly read, teach us about some widely debated issues in Aristotle’s theory of perception? I argue that it refutes two claims defended by Martha Nussbaum, Hilary Putnam, and Richard Sorabji: (i) that when Aristotle speaks of the perceiver becoming like the object perceived, the assimilation he has in mind is ordinary alteration of the type exemplified when fire heats the surrounding air, (ii) that this alteration stands to perceptual awareness as matter to form. Claim (i) is wrong because the assimilation that perceiving is is not ordinary alteration. Claim (ii) is wrong because the special type of alteration that perceiving is is not its underlying material realisation. Indeed, there is no mention in the text of any underlying material realisation for perceiving.

In DA I.2–5, Aristotle offers a series of critical discussions of earlier Greek definitions of the soul. The status of these discussions and the role they play in the justification of Aristotle’s theory of soul in DA II–III is controversial. In contrast to a common view, I argue that these discussions are not dialectical but philosophical. I also contend that Aristotle does not consider earlier philosophical definitions of soul to be endoxa, but rather contradoxa – beliefs about which the many and the wise disagree among themselves. Through an analysis of Plato’s and Empedocles’s definitions of soul, I show that these definitions are nevertheless treated by Aristotle as potential scientific principles for explaining two of the soul’s per se attributes: causing motion and cognition in animate bodies. The main role of the critical discussions in DA I.2–5 is to show that all such earlier definitions of soul fail this explanatory task. Nevertheless, I show that these chapters are not wholly aporetic. Aristotle makes progress by solving two scientific puzzles within them: whether the soul has spatial parts, and whether ‘soul’ refers to a uniform entity across biological species.

The phenomenon of reflective awareness, i.e., perceiving that we perceive, has often been at the center of Aristotelian scholarship, whereas that of perceptual attention, i.e., focusing on something we perceive, has been much less studied. I examine in parallel the textual evidence for these phenomena and offer a concurrent analysis of them in order to understand better how Aristotle conceives them. I argue that the Aristotelian notion of the common sense lies at the basis of the explanation of perceptual attention as much as of that of reflective awareness. In the former case, the common sense perceives the special or common perceptible that it pays attention to in its own right, whereas in the latter case it perceives the act of perceiving coincidentally along with the respective special or common perceptible. Following Aristotle, the Peripatetics defended the view that the phenomenon of reflective awareness is due to the common sense, but paid no heed to perceptual attention. On the other hand, the Neoplatonic commentators conflated the two phenomena and explained both of them by postulating either a rational character of the senses or an attentive part in the rational soul.

In this chapter I develop the point that the knowledge Aristotle particularly wants to explain is knowledge of beings. I work from certain problems he thinks prevented his predecessors from defining psuchē satisfactorily. I focus on two issues in particular: whether knowledge is “like by like” and “alteration.” I argue that the problem raised by both issues is at bottom the same. If knowledge is alteration, and is “like by like,” the result is that our knowledge is so colored by arbitrary facts about us as to belie the idea that it is really of beings as they are “in themselves.” If knowledge is not “like by like,” and leaves its subjects unaltered, the result is to make it unintelligible in principle why subjects of knowledge have anything to do with its putative objects. In short, the problem is how to respect the fact that knowledge is of beings, as they are in their own right, without rendering that fact an inscrutable mystery. For these points I rely on De Anima I 2, III 3, and Metaphysics G 5. These texts combine to establish that, for Aristotle, the outstanding representative of the problems in this area is Protagoras.

This chapter concerns the Aristotelian Feelings. Aristotle provides a list of the feelings in Nicomachean Ethics II 5, but he fails to give any analysis of their inner workings. For that we need to turn to Aristotle’s Rhetoric II 1-11 and passages from his de Anima. While it is a controversial matter to appeal to texts outside the Nicomachean Ethics, I argue that it is possible to draw important lessons from these texts for the interpretation of the Ethics while keeping sight of the major differences between the scope and often of the content of these different works. Two important features of the feelings that emerge from such an examination are: (1) that the feelings provide indexical insight – information about the immediate context of choice and action; and (2) that the feelings, while motivational, only get their direction from a person’s character and the particular circumstances that person is in. For example, sympathy (eleos) may motivate one to help someone in need if one is a good person, or it may motivate one to turn away, if one is a bad person.

Jean de Meun introduces learned words into French or participates in their diffusion. One of these neologisms is worthy of attention: fantasie, which twice occurs in the romance in significant ways as well as two occurrences of sen commun. Inasmuch as it is an imaginative faculty, fantasie points to the influence of Aristotle’s De anima and commentaries on it by Aquinas and Avicenna, among other works in the same tradition. This mediating faculty between perception and knowledge, between body and soul, leads to a physio-psychology that produces both epistemological reflection and a conception of poetic language and literary theory. I will attempt to read the visual experiences evoked by Jean de Meun through a lexical approach to assess the role of fantasie in relation to knowledge, erotic experience, and allegorical fiction: if Jean de Meun seems to align fantasie with the errors of the senses and of pathology, he simultaneously puts faith in human cognitive faculties, describing human knowledge more broadly in terms of the cognitive processes of vision and optics. The writer thus emerges as a producer of images, while the reader is called upon to evaluate and interpret this visual language.

Fernandez and Mittelmann focus on Aristotle’s analogy between the soul as an efficient cause and a craft. They argue that the acts of a craft are a special kind of vital act of a rational soul and that the continuous unifying activity of the source of motion in those cases, which must be constantly and not episodically at work in and throughout each of its acts, is not an idiosyncratic feature of the rational case, but the rational version of a form of efficient causality that is at work in all those vital phenomena of which the soul is said to be the efficient cause.

As shown in chapter 5, reception reveals its powerful translative attitude when considered as a transformative act. This is evident in the case of loose translations such as abridgments, which, through their own reception, are continuously transformed into new texts. The chapter thus offers a different insight into the ways in which Aristotle was read and adapted in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, particularly when his legacy is combined with the reception of other authors. Here I explore the vernacular afterlife of Luca Mannelli’s Latin Compendium moralis philosophiae (circa 1350) and the multifaceted transmission of Jacopo Campora’s vernacular dialogue De immortalitate anime (circa 1430). Both compendia were written by members of the Dominican order with typically scholastic backgrounds and were not particularly innovative in their philosophical content. However, their interest lies in the various ways in which they were disseminated, reshaped, repackaged and marketed. By tracing the transformation of the two works, the chapter documents the broad implications entailed by the proactive nature of vernacular reading practices in late medieval and Renaissance Italy.