When and Why Understanding Needs Phantasmata: A Moderate Interpretation of Aristotle’s De Memoria and De Anima on the Role of Images in Intellectual Activities

Abstract

I offer a new interpretation of the passages where Aristotle maintains that intellectual activity employs φαντάσματα (images). In theoretical understanding of mathematical and natural beings, we usually need to consciously employ appropriate φαντάσματα in order to grasp explanatory connections. Aristotle does not, however, commit himself to thinking that images are required for exercising all theoretical understanding: understanding immaterial things, in particular, may not involve φαντάσματα. Thus the connection that Aristotle makes between images and understanding does not rule out the possibility that human intellectual activity could occur apart from the body.

How Aristotle Changes Anaxagoras’s Mind

“…46 See Cohoe (2013, 372-3). See also Cohoe (2016). This distinction explains why mind, of necessity, does not have a bodily organ.…”

“…DA 1.4, 408b15-19; DA 3.2, 425b24-25), which are resident in certain physical organs in the body, cannot be identical to the mind's objects. SeeCohoe (2016).How Aristotle Changes Anaxagoras's Mind…”

Living without a Soul: Why God and the Heavenly Movers Fall Outside of Aristotle’s Psychology

“…By contrast, nothing about what the activity of contemplative understanding is ties it to our bodies and our other powers. 41 There is also a question about whether theoretical understanding requires the body and necessarily involves φαντάσματα (see Cohoe 2016). In distinguishing between reasoning and contemplation and claiming that we should give a different account of contemplation, Aristotle is not implying that only one of these is part of the human soul. Rather, theoretical understanding, even though it is still an aspect of the individual human soul, is quite different from practical understanding, because it is not a principle of natural movement.…”

“…Even on interpretations on which rational soul can operate apart from the body, e.g. Cohoe (2016), section 9; Carter (2019), pp. 224-225, νοῦς is still "that by which" the rational creature understands.…”

Knowing in Aristotle part 1: Epistēmē, Nous, and non‐rational cognitive states

“…2) or employing images ( DA III 7) whose function is primarily to assist other cognitive activities that actually attain the truth. For Aristotle, recollection is a cognitive process we use to help us get back to some previously grasped truth, while we employ the images of phantasia to help us deliberate better and more successfully achieve practical truths (see Cohoe, 2016, Section 4, 345–348, for discussion). These activities enable the successful contemplation of forms or the true combination or separation of forms but do not themselves consist in it.…”