The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination

Amy Kind

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138574076
• eBook ISBN: 9781317329442
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Imagination occupies a central place in philosophy, going back to Aristotle. However, following a period of relative neglect there has been an explosion of interest in imagination in the past two decades as philosophers examine the role of imagination in debates about the mind and cognition, aesthetics and ethics, as well as epistemology, science and mathematics.

This outstanding Handbook contains over thirty specially commissioned chapters by leading philosophers organised into six clear sections examining the most important aspects of the philosophy of imagination, including:

• Imagination in historical context: Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Husserl, and Sartre
• What is imagination? The relation between imagination and mental imagery; imagination contrasted with perception, memory, and dreaming
• Imagination in aesthetics: imagination and our engagement with music, art, and fiction; the problems of fictional emotions and 'imaginative resistance'
• Imagination in philosophy of mind and cognitive science: imagination and creativity, the self, action, child development, and animal cognition
• Imagination in ethics and political philosophy, including the concept of 'moral imagination' and empathy
• Imagination in epistemology and philosophy of science, including learning, thought experiments, scientific modelling, and mathematics.

The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination is essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy of mind and psychology, aesthetics, and ethics. It will also be a valuable resource for those in related disciplines such as psychology and art.

Part I Historical treatments of imagination

1 Aristotle on phantasia

Deborah K.W. Modrak

DOI: 10.4324/9781315657905-1

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.

De Anima III.3: What phantasia is

After defining 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” (428a1–2).² To fill 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 field, but I can imagine red. Thinking sometimes contradicts phantasia, for instance, as when one sees a small golden disk in the sky but thinks that the sun is larger than the earth (428b2–4). Phantasia has one foot in each camp; it is in some respects like perception and in others like intellection and so Aristotle briefly considers making it a function of the two combined, but this option is quickly ruled out as well.

It is clear, therefore, that phantasia will be neither belief together with perception, nor belief through perception, nor a blend of belief and perception.

(428a24–26)

Having ruled out a quick and unqualified identification of phantasia with perception or thought or the two combined, Aristotle sets out to build an account of phantasia which is sensitive to the common features shared by both types of cognitive faculties. Phantasia has an important role to play in the explanation of both the similarities of perceptual and intellectual cognition and their differences. First, however, the distinctive characteristics of phantasia must be determined. One such feature is phantasia’s vulnerability to error, unlike perception; another is phantasia’s widespread occurrence, nearly all animals possess it, unlike intellection; yet another is its dependence upon perception for its origin and its objects.

Since phantasia is thought to be a kind of movement … this movement cannot exist apart from perception or in things, which do not perceive and in respect of it, it is possible for its possessor to do and be affected by many things, and it may be both true and false.

(428b11–17)

Phantasia is described as a movement because it is an active awareness of certain objects. These objects are the same as those realized in acts of perceptual awareness, namely colors-as-seen, sounds-as-heard, etc. Phantasia plays a central role in our cognitive life, both as active awareness and as a source of retained sensory information. All these features, taken together, support the identification of phantasia with a kind of sensory experience that is distinguishable from perception. Aristotle’s grounds for distinguishing between them are several.

For Aristotle, cognitive activities just are the realization of cognitive objects in acts of awareness. The objects of phantasia are the same as the objects of perception; the only difference is the requirement that the objects of perception must be actualizations of perceptible qualities (colors, sounds, etc.) of external objects, which are the immediate causes of the perceptual experience. Phantasia is different; it may, but need not, occur in the absence of an external sensory stimulus. It cannot occur in cognizers lacking sensory capacities or in the absence of past or concurrent sensory experience. Because its objects are sensory objects, phantasia is able to bridge the divide between perception and thought. Perception proper is constrained, not only by the requirement that its immediate cause be present in the external environment, but also by the requirement of verisimilitude. Perception of proper objects (sensible qualities such as color or sound) is always correct (427b12); and while other types of perception admit error, for the most part perception provides accurate information about perceptible, external objects. Because its connection with the external world is more attenuated, phantasia is much more liable to error. In short, the picture of phantasia that emerges from a careful reading of De Anima III.3 is one of a very versatile cognitive capacity; phantasia is a distinct way of apprehending sensory objects and phantasia may represent its intentional objects accurately or not, because unlike perception it is not constrained by a requirement of verisimilitude. To summarize the conception of phantasia that underlies Aristotle’s findings in III.3: phantasia is the awareness of a sensory content under conditions that are not conducive to veridical perception.³

Taking De Anima III.3 to be the canonical account of phantasia, some commentators have also been led to identify phantasia with nonveridical appearance.⁴ This interpretation is problematic, however, because it limits the role of phantasia in ways that would be detrimental to Aristotle’s account of voluntary motion and action and his account of thinking. He needs a concept of phantasia that is indeterminate with respect to the reliability of the sensory content it presents. In the case of visual illusion, such as the case of the size of the sun mentioned by Aristotle, phantasia is the awareness of a colored shape that is misleading as to the actual size of the sun. In other instances, such as the triangle contemplated by the geometer, phantasia presents sensorially useful and reliable images. To remember is an exercise of phantasia and in this case it is important to have a content that is often reliable but sometimes not. One of the advantages of the conception of phantasia developed in III.3 is that as the awareness of a sensory content under conditions that are not conducive to veridical perception, phantasia may be invoked in explanations both of illusory appearance and of accurate recall.⁵

The sensory character of phantasia is emphasized by Aristotle as he wraps up his analysis in III.3.⁶ However, it is worth noting that the characteristics of phantasia that make it thought-like play an important part in his arriving at this conclusion. The form of thinking that is at issue is belief (doxa) because it may be either true or false. He considers, only to reject, the possibility that phantasia is belief combined with perception (428a24–27). Moreover, the chapter ends with a discussion of the conditions under which phantasia is true or more liable to error.

The movement that comes about as a result of the activity of perception will differ in so far as it comes from these three kinds of perception. The first is true as long as perception is present, while the others may be false whether it is present or absent.

(428b25–29)

As the awareness of a sensory content under conditions that are not conducive to veridical perception, phantasia has the breadth Aristotle desires; any object that can be the content of a perception can also be presented in a phantasma (object of phantasia) and the content so presented may be an accurate representation of an actual object or it may fall short of accuracy due to the conditions under which it is realized. For instance, a visual experience occurring during a fog is much more likely to meet the conditions for phantasia than to meet the conditions for having a veridical perception. A memory of an object seen many years before will rely on phantasia for the presentation of the object; it may or may not be an accurate representation of the object as originally perceived.

Phantasia: remembering and dreaming

Memory (mneme) is the subject of a short, psychological treatise, De Memoria. Aristotle asks and ultimately answers the question, “What is memory?” It is “a disposition of a phantasma [an image], as a likeness to that of which it is a phantasma” (451a15–18).⁷ A phantasma is a complex of sensory characters that are perceptible through any or all senses. Aristotle’s account is intended to cover auditory, olfactory, gustatory and tactile images as well as visual ones and thus a phantasma (image) is made the vehicle for memory. Memory also requires a concomitant awareness of the passage of time. It is not a memory, Aristotle believes, unless we are aware of the remembered object as an object of a past perception.

Sometimes we are in doubt whether it is a memory or not. But sometimes it happens that we reflect or recollect that we heard or saw it before.

(451a5–7)

This account of memory involves a dual-level exercise of phantasia. The image or images, the sensory content(s), which are the vehicle for remembering a past event, are presented to the cognizer by phantasia as standing in a relationship to the experience in which they originated. Aristotle describes the memory image as a likeness (eikon) to capture the referential character of a memory. It is, not only the awareness of a past experience, it is the awareness of that experience as past. This is a complex representation including as it does a reference to the past. Aristotle says that memory belongs to the same psychic faculty as the recognition of time. Later he assigns both to the perceptual faculty of the soul. In explaining how this kind of awareness is possible, he looks to two cases. One is the experience of an object that leaves us in doubt about whether we are having a memory. The other is a case of the mind’s using a sensory content presented in phantasia for a different purpose than merely apprehending the object. In the former, the sensory content is realized as an object of awareness but it fails to refer to the past experience that caused it. This failure is partially due to the representation, which lacks markers of the past, and partially due to the way the cognizer employs the image. In the second case, the mode of awareness involved is emphasized. The geometer, according to Aristotle, apprehends the geometrical object in thought by using a specific image, e.g., a triangle, and then taking it to represent the abstract triangle about which she reasons. The image has a particular size but not so the abstraction, which it represents (450a1–6). Just as a viewer may look at a painting of an animal as an array of colors and shapes or may take it as a representation of an actual animal, the cognizer may take the phantasma as an array of sensible characters or as a likeness of something perceived in the past.

Aristotle appeals to the deliberate use of mnemonic devices to elucidate further his notion of using an image to refer to something outside itself.⁸ For instance, one might envisage a series of houses and then associate each image with an item in a series of things in order to remember the series. In this instance, there is a deliberate use of an image to represent something else. Often, however, in the case of deliberate recall, something beyond memory (mneme) is involved. This is recollection, anamnesis. It is a psychic capacity peculiar to humans and not shared with other animals. To recollect is to set about trying to bring a memory to mind. It requires the capacity to reason. It is by deliberately moving from one thought to another that we are able to prompt memories. Otherwise memories are (like other perceptual activities) responses to environmental sensory stimulation. But in the case of recollection, we set out to try to retrieve a memory. Recollection is a joint function of the perceptual and rational capacities of the human psyche. Recollection is not the only complex, cognitive activity which requires the collaboration of the perceptual and rational faculties. Whenever such collaboration is involved, Aristotle turns to phantasia to facilitate the collaboration, as shall be seen when we turn to deliberate action and abstract thought.

Memory is an exercise of phantasia where verisimilitude is a requirement. Dreaming by contrast is not but it, too, is the topic of a short psychological treatise and it is also addressed in a second work on divination.⁹

A dream seems to be a kind of imagery [phantasma] … and it is apparent that dreaming belongs to the perceptual faculty but belongs to it qua phantastikon [capacity for phantasia].

(De Ins. 459a18–22)

Dreaming occurs during sleep and is not to be confused with perceiving something in sleep, e.g., hearing a cock crow (462a24–25). It is only a dream insofar a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Exploring imagination
• Part I Historical treatments of imagination
• Part II Contemporary discussions of imagination
• Part III Imagination in aesthetics
• Part IV Imagination in philosophy of mind and cognitive science
• Part V Imagination in ethics, moral psychology, and political philosophy
• Part VI Imagination in epistemology, philosophy of science, and philosophy of mathematics
• Index