Sense and the SensibleAristotle

Sense and the Sensible (De sensu et sensibilibus) is the first of Aristotle's Parva Naturalia, the short treatises that follow De Anima and treat functions common to body and soul. Having explained perception in general, Aristotle turns to the special senses and their objects: color, sound, odor, savour, and the tangible. He argues that sensation belongs to animals as such, that touch and taste are necessary for life, and that the distance senses serve both survival and, in intelligent creatures, knowledge. Seeing, he says, is superior for the needs of life; hearing contributes more to intelligence, because discourse is audible.

The treatise works through rival theories of the sense organs. Against Empedocles and the Timaeus, Aristotle rejects the view that the eye sees by a fire or ray issuing from it. The eye is of water, translucent, and vision requires a medium of light between object and organ. He defines color as the limit of the translucent in a bounded body, and treats white and black as presence and privation of light in that medium. Intermediate colors arise by mixture. Savours arise when the dry and earthy is washed through the moist by heat; the sweet is the properly nutrient, and the other tastes are intermediate between sweet and bitter. Throughout he insists that the common sensibles (figure, magnitude, motion, number) are not the proper objects of any one sense, against Democritus and others who reduce all perception to touch or to atomic shapes.

The work fixes the natural-philosophical account of sense that later commentators, from Alexander of Aphrodisias through Aquinas, treated as the standard extension of De Anima. It belongs to the same inquiry that continues in On Memory and Reminiscence, On Sleep, and On Dreams.