Azafea: Revista de Filosofía (Mar 2014)
The Evidence in Ancient Philosophy
Abstract
Enargeia became a technical term –to which Cicero coined the neologism evidentia for its translation– in the Hellenistic Epistemology, so it seems, beginning from Epicurus. In his analysis of the perceptive evidence he developed a relevant reformulation of the nature of perceiving and the Aristotelian typology of sensibilia which bases the truth of perception on the autonomy and opacity of each one of the senses in relation to the rest of the senses and other faculties such as memory or reason. Sextus Empiricus objected to this type of approach that every perceptive act entails synthesis, in which memory or reason get involved, and requires the affection (pathos), which comes between perception and object, and makes the perceptive evidence another case of inference through signs. The basic reflexivity mode which was designated as synaisthesis in Late Antiquity seems to have been put forward against the second objection of Sextus Empiricus.
