Abstract

In the De Anima Aristotle characterizes sensible and intellectual cognition as the assimilation of the knower to that which is known. The thesis, comprising an introduction and three chapters, studies this famous but relatively uninvestigated doctrine. ;Chapter one, an extended exposition of Greek, medieval and Renaissance commentary on De Anima, finds a common preoccupation with the immaterial model of reception of form in all cases of cognition. Even sensation, the Greek commentators urge, is an immaterial change in a sense organ and not a physical assimilation to the sensible object. ;Chapter two discusses contemporary accounts of sensation in Aristotle. Falling into three groups , they all assume that the actually functioning sense organ is physically assimilated to the sensible object. The second part of the chapter seeks to undermine this common assumption by an examination of Aristotle's general account of sensation and his individual treatment of the five senses . ;Chapter three seeks a positive account of immaterial cognitive reception of form by considering Aristotle's treatment of intellectual cognition. In De Anima III 4 intellectual cognition of things is distinguished from reception of their forms through which they are known. An extended discussion of III 6 relates the simple or complex indivisibility of what is thought to the claim that the mind is what it thinks, in accord with the Aristotelian tenet that what is is one. A discussion of Aristotle's relation of "knowledge of" to "knowledge that" ensues, leading to a more detailed understanding of the role of reception of form in every intellectual act of the mind. These thinking acts, like sensitive acts, are cases of the reception of form without matter. Aristotle also calls them modes of life, where life is a equivocal whose reference is the life of self-contemplating separate substance described in Metaphysics XII. The thesis argues that an adequate account of sensation or intellection requires this usually neglected reference to the primary instance of cognition, form absolutely free from matter, that is, separate substance