ABSTRACT
Aristotle gives great importance to the function of sense-perception; he considers it as the primary basis for other functions, like imagination, memory, and thought. The philosopher starts the discussion by stating that sense-perception is the result of an activation and a process which leads to change (alloiosis) in the organism, functional and possibly structural—as one can gather from his whole exposition. Sense-perception is considered an active phenomenon and not one passively produced by an external stimulus, as other philosophers of his time thought. Aristotle describes five senses, the same way that modern physiology does: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. Sense-perception is such a paradigm; in many passages of his work On the Soul he relates sense-perception with the function of thought and of judgement. In the treatise On Memory Aristotle describes how sense-perception is basic for the production of images in the mind, that is, mental representations which are retained and later recalled, so that memory can be effected.
