Sens externes et sens internes chez Blaise de Parme

This essay reconstructs the plot about the relationship between internal and external senses in Biagio Pelacani’s Quaestiones de anima. A key concept in Pelacani’s psychophysiology is that of sensus agens: it is a theory dealing with the relationship between two parts of sensitive soul, the cognitive and the appetitive one, on the basis of a conception of soul as subiectum materiale; hence the new interpretation that overcomes ontological dialectic of potentiality and actuality, matter and form, sanctioned by the tradition of Christian Aristotelianism in many ways. The necessity of all the operationes of human soul - both sensible and intellectual – is theorized, in the light of Pelacani’s materialistic founded psychophysiology, through a theoretical framework where the mathematical-experimental concept of cognitio visiva, built on the revisited Aristotelian psychological model of internal senses, becomes a topic of central concern.