Cognition on Cognition

This broad-ranging volume includes a series of articles that were originally published as a special issue of Cognition produced to celebrate the 50th volume of the journal. Written by some of the foremost scientists studying different aspects of the mind, the articles review progress achieved over the past twenty-five years in the main areas of the discipline.

This edited work draws on a range of contributed expertise to trace the fortune of an Aristotelian thesis over different periods in the history of philosophy. It presents eight cases of direct or indirect challenges to the Aristotelian passive account of human cognition, taking the reader from late antiquity to the 20th century. Chapters analyse the (often indirect) effect of Aristotle’s account of cognition on later periods. In his influential De anima, Aristotle describes human cognition, both sensitive and intellectual, as the reception of a form in the cognitive subject.