ABSTRACT
The Greek and Latin Aristotelian commentators of late antiquity were intrigued by the opening lines of the De Interpretatione and, in particular, by Aristotle’s claim that all people share the same thoughts. This chapter closely studies their different interpretations; it especially focuses on Alexander of Aphrodisias’ view and tries to reconstruct it on the basis of the available scarce evidence. For contrary to the Neoplatonists, who later identified the affections of the soul (παθήματα τῆς ψυχῆς) with thoughts (νοήματα), Alexander seems to have drawn an important distinction between them: Affections of the soul result from the reception by the soul of enmattered perceptible forms, that is, of the forms of actual things perceived as enmattered but without their matter. Thoughts, on the other hand, are generated from sense perceptions by the intellect’s capacity to entirely separate the forms of actual things from their matter. It seems that, according to Alexander, Aristotle understood affections of the soul in this way, and this is why he claimed that they are shared by all people, whereas thoughts represented for him abstract concepts or combinations of abstract concepts, and this is why they could differ.
