ABSTRACT
The breadth of Aristotle’s conception of imagination (phantasia) is extraordinary and sets the stage for the discussion of imagination in subsequent literature.1 Aristotle appeals to phantasia to explain behavior of all sorts, especially to explain behavior that seems to be guided by reason, but is not, in cases where the agent (a child, a drunken adult or a nonrational animal) lacks the capacity for rational judgment. He also appeals to phantasia to explain the human mind’s ability to transition seamlessly between perception and thought. In this capacity, phantasia is required for thinking. In addition, he assigns nonveridical perceptual experiences to phantasia, including cases of illusion, delusion and dreaming. The wide scope of Aristotle’s vision of phantasia is – if a unified analysis underwrites it – a
great strength. If it should turn out that Aristotle has made a number of only minimally connected claims about phantasia in different contexts, the breadth of his account would become a weakness. The goal then is to attempt to bring the various functions of phantasia together in a way that displays the comprehensiveness of his account while maintaining its unity. The approach to be followed here will be to begin with Aristotle’s account of phantasia in De Anima III.3 and to offer an interpretation of phantasia based on this chapter, which emphasizes the sensory character of phantasia. Taking this to be Aristotle’s core concept of phantasia, we will turn to the roles Aristotle assigns phantasia in his analyses of memory, dreaming, thought and voluntary motion in the De Anima, Parva Naturalia and elsewhere. The core concept is, it will be argued, at work in all these contexts.
