Perception and judgement in Augustine's De musica

The object of my research is the lexicon of perception and judgment in the sixth book of the treatise De musica, which is one of the earliest philosophical dialogues written by Augustine. This treatise is often regarded as one of the first theoretical attempts to write a psychology of music and a philosophy of rhythm in the Western tradition. In De musica, Augustine introduces the concept of numeri, which can denote rhythms and meters, and then proposes a typology of the various numeri in the form of a hierarchy-from corporeal to incorporeal-that humans can perceive and judge. Although philosophers and theologians periodically address the specifics of the semantic meanings considering perception and judgment in De musica, no classification of the semantic contexts of these concepts has been produced. In my research, I aim to analyze the semantic contexts of the verbs of perception and judgment and their derivatives (such as sentio, excipio, percipio, capere, iudicio, and aestimare) and identify different semantic meanings in order to clarify Augustine's solution to the central theoretical problem of the sixth book of De musica: how human beings are able to perceive non-bodily numeri bodily. Keywords: Augustine, De musica, perception, judgment, semantic analysis