Was Aristotle an empiricist? From the start, Marc Gasser-Wingate makes it clear that the aim of his book “is not to defend the label,” but “to show that Aristotle had an interesting conception of perception’s role as a starting point for our learning, and of its relation to various more advanced forms of practical and theoretical knowledge” (xii). The author achieves this goal with distinction, advancing clear and compelling arguments, which combine careful discussions of specific passages with a broad view of the notion of perception within Aristotle’s work as a whole.
The claim that Aristotle sees perception as a starting point for knowledge is not exactly controversial. In Posterior Analytics 2.19 (hereafter cited as APo), he describes it as a basic cognitive capacity that gives rise to other, superior forms of knowledge, including scientific understanding. However, this vague description is compatible with different epistemological doctrines. For instance, perception...
