234 Aristotle and his school
said to act on (cf. the use of !0 - 0 0 !
0 0
0
0 $L. The only terminological point we can make is that
a number of passages assign an important role todianoia, and it may be that
this is Aristotle’s favourite term for intellectual activity on the borderlines
between sense-perception and thinking; one sometimes gets the impression
that it refers to a particular kind of thinking, a sort of attention, in any case
a directed and concentrated intellectual activity (or the capacity to this).^93
In this connection, it may be worth referring to a dispute between two Ger-
man students of Aristotle’s psychology in the second half of the nineteenth
century, namely Clemens B ̈aumker and Joseph Neuh ̈auser. B ̈aumker, in
his monograph on Aristotle’s physiology of sense perception, argued that
Aristotle adopted a fourth ‘part of the soul’ in between perception and in-
tellectK$L, for which
was supposed to be the technical term;^94
and B ̈aumker did so on the strength of a number of passages I have also
discussed above. Neuhauser, however, rejected B ̈ aumker’s view by pointing ̈
to a number of passages in which the verbdianoeisthaiseems to be used as
a general, non-specific term foranyintellectual activity, including that of
nous.^95 Although there is no evidence that Aristotle really regarded ‘lower’
intellectual capacities as constituting a separate ‘part’ of the soul, it must be
conceded that especially in passages where he adopts a gradualist point of
view,dianoiaseems to be the appropriate term, and it may be that Aristotle
associates this term more closely with activities of the sensitive part of the
soul, and thus with bodily influences, than other terms such aslogos,nous,
sunesis, phron ̄esis, doxaandhupolepsis ̄. There is, indeed, abundant evidence
that in the border area between sense-perception and thinking, where elu-
sive faculties such as ‘incidental perception’ (the perception that that white
thing over there is the son of Diares), ‘common sense’ and imagination are
at work, Aristotle is not always clear whether we are dealing with operations
of the sensitive or the intellectual part of the soul.^96 The passage on recollec-
tion (an intellectual activity restricted to human beings but taking place in
physical material) fromMem. 453 a 14 ff. provided a good illustration of this
point.
(^93) Cf.Div. somn. 464 a 22 , where a failure to exercise this capacity is described.
(^94) B ̈aumker ( 1877 ) 7 with n. 2.
(^95) Neuh ̈auser ( 1878 a) 10 ff. See also Neuhauser’s review of B ̈ aumker’s monograph ( ̈ 1878 b).
(^96) For incidental perception see Cashdollar ( 1973 ). The question whether the judgement of images is a
sensitive or an intellectual activity presents itself very strongly inOn Dreams, where sometimes one
sense (sight) corrects the other (touch), as in 460 b 21 – 2 , but sometimes also an intellectual faculty
is at work (as in 460 b 18 – 19 ), and sometimes it is unclear which faculty is judging ( 461 b 3 ff.; 461 b
25 ; 462 a 4 , 6 ). For a discussion of this difficulty see van der Eijk ( 1994 ) 50 ff.