This chapter looks at Aristotle's account of the perceptual capacity of the soul as delineated in the treatise De Anima. Like the soul as a whole, the perceptual part of the soul is divided conceptually into the individual senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. Each of these senses receives a separate treatment in the second book of the De Anima. In the third book Aristotle deals with certain issues concerning perception in such a way that it becomes clear that the perceptual capacity of the soul is not an aggregate of the individual senses, but a unified whole. That is, Aristotle's conceptual division of the perceptual part of the soul permits it to be differentiated into distinct sense-modalities while at the same time remaining a unity.
Keywords: Aristotle, De Anima, soul, form, perception, perceptual capacity, individual senses