Receptive Reason – An Aristotelian Approach

This project undertakes the task of answering the question of whether the human reason can involve receptivity of a certain kind. Aristotle makes such a claim both in his account of how the principles of scientific knowledge is acquired (Posterior Analytics 2.19) and in his analysis of human reason in book 3 of On the Soul. The whole interpretive tradition from late antiquity to the present day has found this claim so unpalatable that readers of Aristotle have either rejected it or tried to explain it away. The only exception has been Alexander of Aphrodisias, the professor of Aristotelian philosophy in Athens around 200CE, in his On the Soul – and even Alexander denies the claim in his small treatise On Intellect.

This project opens a new chapter in scholarship on Aristotle by showing that the attempts to circumvent the claim of receptivity of reason are in conflict not only with what Aristotle explicitly says about the topic but with a number of main tenets of his philosophy such as his his metaphysical analysis of intelligible objects, his theology and embryology.

By showing how to understand the claim of receptivity of human reason in Aristotle’s philosophy, we show that a similar notion, suitably qualified, is a viable alternative for present-day theories of the human mind, its place in the world and our capacity for knowledge-acquisition.