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ARISTOTLE ON PHANTASIA
Deborah K.W. Modrak

The breadth of Aristotles 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
minds 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 Aristotles vision of phantasia is if a unied 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 dierent 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 Aristotles account of phantasia
in De Anima III.3 and to oer an interpretation of phantasia based on this chapter, which
emphasizes the sensory character of phantasia. Taking this to be Aristotles 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.

De Anima III.3: What phantasia is

After dening the functions of the soul and discussing the basic perceptual functions at length
in De Anima II, Aristotle turns in De Anima III.3 to the nature of phantasia. Phantasia is that
in virtue of which we say an image [phantasma] arises in us (428a12).2 To ll out this
preliminary account, Aristotle begins by establishing the similarities between perceiving and
thinking and then he argues that they are activities of distinct psychic faculties. He also argues
against assigning phantasia either to the perceptual faculty of the soul or the rational faculty.
Neither sensing nor thinking simpliciter has all the same characteristics as phantasia. Sensing
cannot occur in the absence of an appropriate object. For instance, I cannot see red, if there
is nothing red in my visual eld, but I can imagine red. Thinking sometimes contradicts

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