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It is impossible to say for certain whether Isidore actually read Pliny's Natural History at fijirst hand. As anyone who has ever considered the question of Isidore's (or indeed Pliny's) sources knows only too well, it can be almost impossible to tell what the authors of encyclopaedic and compilatory works such as the Natural History or the Etymologies, reliant as they were on multiple secondary sources, used directly and which at one or more removes. Material deriving ultimately from Pliny permeates the entire Etymologies; whether it was sourced at fijirst hand or derived from an intermediary is impossible to say for certain. 1 All we can be sure of is a pervasive Plinian flavour or echo to much of Isidore's material. Threads of thought, recognizable from a reading of Pliny, recur in the books of the Etymologies. This chapter will examine one such thread, human anomaly. The aim is not primarily to locate inspiration from Pliny in Isidore but to consider how each treated an idea of central importance to their respective worldviews.

This chapter defends a naïve view of the relation between the temporal structure of the objects of experience, and the temporal structure of experience itself. According to the naïve view, when all goes well, your stream of consciousness inherits the temporal structure of the events that are its contents. You “take in” the temporal structure of the events you witness in witnessing them. As a result, the temporal structure of experience matches the temporal structure of its objects. In cases of illusion, it is as if this is so. Thus, in every case, the temporal structure of experience matches the

Philosophers and cognitive scientists have recently argued that perception is enactive (e.g., Varela, Thompson, & Rosch 1991; Noë, 2004; Di Paolo, 2009).¹ To put it simply, perception is action-oriented. When I perceive something, I perceive it as actionable. That is, I perceive it as somethingI canreach, or not; somethingI canpick up, or not; somethingI canhammer with, or not, and so forth. Such affordances (Gibson, 1977, 1979) for potential actions (even if I am not planning to take action) shape the way that I actually perceive the world. One can find the roots of this

Phenomenalive on this side, literally, of the soul, but they are beyond things. That is, the place in which things become phenomena is not the soul, but neither is it material existence. Aristotle writes that for there to be something sensible (and therefore for there to be sensation), “it is indispensable that there besomethingin between” [hōst’anagkaion ti einai metaxy].¹ There is always anintermediaryplace between us and objects, a womb in which the object becomes sensible, a space in which it becomesphainomenon. It is in this intermediary space that things become capable of being sensed,

Phenomenalive on this side, literally, of the soul, but they are beyond things. That is, the place in which things become phenomena is not the soul, but neither is it material existence. Aristotle writes that for there to be something sensible (and therefore for there to be sensation), “it is indispensable that there besomethingin between” [hōst’anagkaion ti einai metaxy].¹ There is always anintermediaryplace between us and objects, a womb in which the object becomes sensible, a space in which it becomesphainomenon. It is in this intermediary space that things become capable of being sensed,

We live under the perpetual influence of the sensible: odors, colors, the flavor of the food that nourishes us, the melodies and the most commonplace sounds are the very first causes, the ends, the unceasing occasions of our gestures. Our existence—whether sleeping or awake—is a relentless stream of the sensible. All of the images with which we constantly nourish ourselves, ceaselessly feeding our waking and dreaming experiences, define the real ity and the sense of each and every movement we make. They provide reality to our thoughts and a body to our desires. We cannot measure the limits