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Abstract

The topic of perception in medieval philosophy has been the focus of numerous scholarly contributions in the last decades, but this scholarly output has mostly focused on questions related to faculty psychology, metaphysics of cognitive change, epistemological ontology, etc. In my talk I want instead to focus on the question of whether in perception we are in direct contact with external things, resulting in our awareness of that external thing as having certain sensible features, or only with representations of those sensible properties.

My aim is to show that the best way to answer this question is by reflecting on what kind of properties constitute or are included in the content of human perceptual experiences. My argument, which I substantiate with two case studies, is that in some instances – perhaps in all instances – the content of human perceptual experiences includes properties that are not immediately, directly, and causally made available from our contact with an external thing. Not only this commits the authors I will be examining to a version of representationalism, but it allows me to present a broader challenge to the traditional, direct realist interpretation of most medieval philosophy of perception.

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