Medieval Philosophy

by Peter S. Adamson

and not attending to the things around them. I should note that Olivi doesn’t rule out that the eyes are somehow affected by their surroundings. To the contrary, he admits that they are, as is clear from Roger Bacon’s observation that we continue to see afterimages of bright lights after we stop looking at them. Olivi’s claim is rather that the physical effects in the eyes or other sense organs do not cause sensation. The soul perceives simply by attending to the things to which it has access. And there’s another possible misunderstanding we should avoid. Olivi is not claiming that we have to be giving something our full and undivided attention in order to perceive it. If you’re reading this book while a bowl of olives is on the table in front of you, you may be seeing the bowl without, as we might say, really paying attention to it. But according to Olivi this shows merely that the soul’s active attention comes in degrees. It can be entirely absent, as in the sleeping case, or it can consist in the kind of basic, background awareness of our surroundings that we have as we go about our waking lives. He would no doubt have loved the example of overhearing your name at a party, since it suggests that your soul is actively monitoring the environment all the time, always ready to give particularly close attention to whatever seems salient and interesting. Who has the better of the debate between Olivi and the representationalist? It’s hard to say, given that philosophers of pe...