The Breadth of Common-Sensing in Aristotle--draft

In his interpretation of Aristotle, D.W. Hamlyn thinks that we ought to wrest apart the faculty responsible for perception of the common-objects from that responsible for sophisticated perceptual capacities like joint perception and perceptual discrimination. In this paper, I argue that such a reading is inconsistent with Aristotle’s remarks in De Memoria 1 that unite perception of time, magnitude, and change with the faculty that underpins the production of images. I address Pavel Gregoric’s 2007 interpretation, which is continuous with Hamlyn’s, and show that it cannot motivate the apparent continuity found within the passage. It is thus shown that the traditional interpretation is preferable, and that despite their apparent differences, Aristotle understands all of these perceptual abilities as sharing an explanation in terms of the common-sense.