Abstract

This paper investigates the internal tensions within the account of “spiritual forms” in the ninth century Arabic adaptation of Aristotle’s Parva naturalia. In the context of memory, these forms are introduced as mental representations of perceived reality; in the context of veridical dreaming, however, they as well as the perceptible objects are characterized as representations of a higher reality associated with the external “universal intellect,” and moreover seem to require their own ontologically independent realm of “spirituality.”