Sense-Perception

Aisthesis, sense-perception, was one of the great battlegrounds of Greek epistemology: the fight over whether, and how, the senses give us genuine knowledge. Parmenides (early 5th c. BCE) and later Plato distrusted the senses and exalted reason, while Aristotle (4th c. BCE) worked out a careful, positive account of perception as the faculty through which the soul takes in the forms of sensible things. The Epicureans went furthest, holding that every sensation is true, and the Stoics built knowledge on a 'cognitive impression' delivered by the senses. Perception thus became the very fault line separating the rationalist, empiricist, and skeptical schools.