The idea that Aristotle portrays perception as a kind of conceptual activity is supported by this thesis. This support is the result of a detailed consideration of Aristotle's formal characterizations of perception in De Anima II.5, II.12, and III.2. The first chapter considers Aristotle's doctrine that actual sense and sense-object are 'the same, but different in being' (DA III.2). This doctrine may amount to the dispositional view that sense-qualities as sensed exist only when sensed, or to the trivial view that sensed sense-qualities so exist. Aristotle's treatment of his non-Democritean predecessors, and his positive account of the sense-qualities in DA and DS, cannot decide between these interpretations. His rejection of the Democritean dispositional theory on the basis of features shared by all dispositional theories, however, would seem to confirm the trivial interpretation of the unity-of-actuality doctrine. The second chapter turns to Aristotle‘s doctrine that perception is a special kind of assimilation of the senser to the object of sense (DA 11.5). A change in the senser's sense-organs is unlikely~fo be a case of the special kind of assimilation, whose distinctive feature is its status as an energeia. The senser's cognitive assimilation to the oBgect of sense, on the other hand, might well be. The view that Aristotle's assimilation doctrine identifies such an assimilation, however, requires support from Aristotle‘s form-without-matter doctrine. The doctrine that sense receives the sensible forms without the matter (DA 11.12) is thus the subject of the third chapter. Physicalist and unity-of-actuality interpretations of this doctrine, antecedently implausible, are in fact unsatisfactory. An acceptable non-physicalist interpretation, however, may be based on the view that a form-without-matter is a universal. On this interpretation, Aristotle's form-without-matter doctrine (supplemented by his assimilation doctrine) states that perception is the reception of a particular sensible as a sensible. If this interpretation is right, Aristotle would indeed see perception as a kind of conceptual activity.</p
