Abstract

Anaxagoras is notorious for his view that every perception is accompanied by pain but not all concurrent pains are distinctly felt by the perceiving subject. This thesis is reported and criticized by Aristotle’s heir Theophrastus in his De Sensibus. Traditionally, scholars believe that he rejects Anaxagoras’s these of the ubiquity of pain as counterintuitive, with the appeal to unfelt pain looking like a desperate category mistake given that pain is nothing but a feeling. Contra the traditional view, this paper argues that Theophrastus neither aims to defend ordinary phenomenology nor is he bothered by the concept of unfelt pain; instead, he develops a series of new Aristotelian arguments to defend a controversial, optimistic picture about the distribution of affective qualities in animal life. More than a supplement to Aristotle’s psychology, his engagement with Anaxagoras reveals an important yet often ignored ethical concern behind the Peripatetic philosophy of perception.