Abstract

Everson examines Aristotle's use of the term empeiria, particularly as it appears in Metaphysics I.1 and Posterior Analytics II.19. Empeiria is usually translated as ‘experience’, but Everson argues that it ought to be interpreted as ‘an acquired perceptual concept’. Such concepts are involved in determining the content of perceptual experience. On this account, perceptual awareness is a combination of phantasia and the presence or absence of a certain empeiria, i.e. of the acquired perceptual concept appropriate for the perceptual awareness in question.