Abstract

When Aristotle completes his discussion of the sensitive faculty in the De Anima, he does not begin a treatment of mind directly. He interposes imagination, which is dependent on sense of its origin, but in turn is necessary for thinking. ;His treatment, however, is disjointed: imagination is introduced abruptly, and its various aspects are not harmoniously presented. Thus commentators often accuse Aristotle of inconsistency. Some stress imagination's active side; others argue that only the passive aspect as weakened sensation is significant. ;The introduction to the present thesis surveys the leading commentators on the De Anima since Freudenthal to discover their insights regarding the problem of mediation between sensing and thinking. The survey reveals no commonly accepted understanding of this work of imagination. ;To determine this function more precisely, then, I examine all^the occurrences of "" in the corpus, isolating those^technical uses frm the more colloquial. "" includes^visual appearance, sensible appearance in general, and illusion.^In the psychological works, however, it almost always designates^the faculty of imagination. Yet "," like its cognates,^never loses its ambivalent character. Imagination as a power of soul mediates between sense perception and thinking, successfully preserving the sensible forms, but it is also a source of error. ;In the next section I consider imagination in itself. Nussbaum's^claim that De Anima III, 3, does not contain Aristotle's central^teaching on imagination, since it presents an untenable "mental^picture" view, is shown to be deficient, as is Schofield's attempt^to render III, 3, consistent by proposing that imagination is our^capacity for having non-paradigmatic sensory experience. It is^argued that every occurrence of "" can be reconciled^with the definition offered at 428alff. Farm from finding Aristotle^committed to a "mental picture" view, we see him reject it. ;The fourth chapter is an account of imagination's role in thinking. Here I discuss the interplay of desire and imagination in locomotion for the light it sheds on deliberation. ;A similarity is noted between speculative and practical thinking in the order of discovery, and imagination's projection of scenarios is remarked. In the order of justification, the image is often expressed in a word which services as a summary reminder of previous successful thinking. ;Concept acquisition, too, is dependent on imagination: while sensing may conceivably give rise to a concept immediately, remembering it or manipulating it would be impossible. ;The final chapter explores the relationship between imagination and . Rather than postulate a separate internal sensing power, however, either identical to imagination or having imagining as one of its functions, I argue that Aristotle intends the unanalyzed power of sense perception. And so imagination, whose virtue is to be in actuality even after the external sensation has ceased, is distinct from sensing, yet it enables its possessors to achieve effects far beyond the limits of external sensation.