How Much Logos Is There in Aisthesis? Aristotle’s Phenomenology of Perception

Abstract

Over the course of the history of philosophy, very different answers have been given to the question regarding the relationship between ‘logos’ and ‘aisthesis’. If ‘logos’ is taken to be tantamount to conceptual propositionality, sensible experience (‘aisthesis’) is both been declared totally non-propositional and sometimes wholly consistent with propositionality. In a first step, the paper aims at clarifying the position of Husserl’s phenomenology on this point, explicating the sense of this project of an analysis of the “logos of the aesthetic world”. In a second step, the paper argues that striking similarities can be found between Husserl’s own project and Aristotle’s inquiry into the structure of ‘aisthesis’. In a third and slightly provocative move, the paper explains why there are good reasons to consider that Aristotle should be read as a proto-phenomenologist, and that his work ‘De anima’ (On the Soul) is, for the most part, a phenomenology of perception. The main claim will be that the where Aristotle and phenomenology converge is on the fact that the structure of predication is inconmensurable to the structure of phenomenality.