Sensory awareness and self-awareness in Buridan and Oresme
pp. 383-395
in: Jenny Pelletier, Magali Roques (eds), The language of thought in late medieval philosophy, Berlin, Springer, 2017Abstract
An Aristotelian faced with the difficult problem of explaining the phenomenon of sensory awareness and self-awareness in both human and non-human animals, John Buridan (ca. 1300–1361) appeals to the Augustinian notion of sensus interior or internal sense, a power of the soul operating in the body through the medium of sensitive or vital spirits. These spirits are a subtle fluid capable of transmitting sensed intentions in a living animal, and their active circulation throughout the body corresponds to baseline self-awareness, making possible an animal's sub-rational or non-intellectual self perception. On the other hand, Buridan's slightly younger Parisian contemporary, Nicole Oresme (ca. 1320–1382), appears to treat self-awareness as unique to humans, denying that brute animals are ever aware that they see or hear because he holds that the power of sensory cognition – which is all that they have – is not reflexive. Despite this, he allows that brute animals are able to recognize unsensed intentions and even that their imaginings can sometimes alter their sensations. But Oresme seems more interested in explaining apparently anomalous sensory phenomena than in identifying any broader mechanism of self-cognition.
