THE FLUIDITY OF A CONCEPT

Auditory Species in the Conimbricenses, Arriaga and Schelhammer

Abstract

The terminology of “auditory species” was prevalent in theories of sound and hearing from Antiquity to the Early Modern period for its use in explaining the intermediary stages of sound propagation and perception. Its very existence, however, was a topic of extensive debate among the scholastics. Each tried to square their account with Aristotle’s mention of “sensible forms” in De an. II 12, while going far beyond Aristotle’s text and looking for opportunities for creative interpretation of the terminology, as Aristotle himself never clearly defined what they are, nor specified their way of generation and existence in the medium and the sense organs. With regard to auditory perception, the most general account holds that auditory species proceed from the sounding object to the ears, where they are captured by the sensory faculty. Over the centuries, the terminology and general account have remained in use, yet the specific ideas behind them have changed dramatically. In this paper, I shall point out three distinct ways of putting auditory species to use in 16^th- and 17^th-century authors differently connected to the Aristotelian tradition, namely the Coimbra commentators, the Prager theologian Rodrigo de Arriaga, and the German medical professor Christoph Günther Schelhammer. I argue that the terminology of auditory species can be creatively accommodated to an astoundingly wide spectrum of philosophical frameworks that have different takes on the gradation of materiality, the mode of interaction between the material and the immaterial, and the nature of air motion that contributes to sound generation and propagation.