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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Ancient Theories of Intellection

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Ancient philosophical schools shared the view that, in addition to perceptual capacities, human beings have reason. It was also generally supposed that reason is not to be understood solely as a capacity of inference, but that it must also have content (1). Such content was often taken to be general: as opposed to perception which deals with particulars, reasoning operates with general or universal features of reality. However, views diverged as to how or whether such contents are acquired and whether they rather pre-exist in the soul. Whereas the view according to which intelligible forms can be grasped by human reason was wide-spread in the Platonic-Aristotelian tradition, Hellenistic philosophers did not accept the metaphysics of forms and thus also had different views on the objects of reason.