Durand of St.-Pourçain and John Buridan on Species: Direct Realism with and without Representation

Abstract

Hartman’s chapter takes up “the species debate” in greater detail, focusing in particular on the arguments of Durand of St.-Pourçain (ca. 1270–1334) against the need for species in sensation. Noting that most philosophers in the later Middle Ages agreed that what we immediately perceive are external objects and that the immediate object of perception must not be some image present to the mind, Hartman points out that most of these same philosophers also held, following Aristotle, that perception is a process whereby the percipient takes on the likeness of the external object, i.e., the species, a representation by means of which we immediately perceive external objects. But how can perception be at once direct, or immediate, and also by way of representations? John Buridan defends the traditional view, “direct realism with representations,” which holds that the species represents the external object to some percipient even though it is not that which the percipient perceives, but that by which she perceives.