The Unmoved Causes of Receptivity: Sense-Perception and Thinking as Passive Activities in Aristotle’s “De Anima”

The dissertation argues that in De anima Aristotle develops a novel notion of passive activities to characterize the nature of sense-perception (αἰσθάνεσθαι) and thinking (νοεῖν). It inquires into how, according to Aristotle, sense-perception and thinking are explained by their two unmoved causes: the object of sense-perception / thinking on the one side and the perceptive / thinking soul on the other side. It provides the first systematic exploration of the causal analogies and dis-analogies Aristotle draws in De Anima.