Aristotle on Memory 9781472598110, 9780715632390

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TO KATE

Introduction to the Second Edition Aristotle’s On Memory and Reminding Oneself, to give it its fuller title, remains the first major western treatment of memory, the first attempt to define it, and the earliest extant description of mnemonic processes of reminding oneself, as well as a locus classicus for the association of ideas which influenced empiricist philosophers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These philosophers also made a substantial use of mental imagery. Mnemonics In my interpretation of Aristotle in the first edition of this book, I made the use of pictorial mental images rather prominent. The part of the book most liked by critics had to do with this: it was the correction of manuscript readings in Aristotle’s account (452a17-24) of how mnemonists can recollect, as described in my Chapter 2. I took Aristotle to be referring to the ancient mnemonic system, still taught today, which relies on vivid and sometimes grotesque pictorial mental images of places. On this view, the letters of the alphabet which Aristotle introduces stand for such mental images. Some recent accounts of Renaissance and modern mnemonist practices, especially that of the great Russian neuropsychologist A.R. Luria,1 enabled me to see how to correct the confusion of alphabet letters in the manuscripts so as to get back to the original mnemonist advice of Aristotle on which imaged places to ‘visit’ when recollecting. The advice must have baffled copyists – hence the jumble of disparate manuscript readings. Luria’s mnemonist patient put his abnormal and intrusive mental imagery to use, along with the place system of memory, in order to perform memory stunts. I wrote to Luria and asked if he or his patient knew that the technique described was an ancient one, and he replied that he had had no idea. I have not yet seen two German accounts of Aristotle’s mnemonic techniques,2 the second at ix

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least of which offers an alternative to my account, but not, as far as I know, on the manuscript readings. Aristotle mentions a person who was somewhat like Luria’s patient in yet another way. Antipheron of Oreus, we are told at 451a8, spoke of his mental images as things that had occurred and were being remembered. Luria’s patient had a corresponding difficulty with imagining, rather than remembering. He failed to distinguish lying in bed and imagining getting himself ready for school from actually getting himself ready for school. As regards memory, he had the advantage that he could read off from his mental images the numerals written on a board many years earlier. But this involved problems: he would misread a ‘3’ that had been badly written to look like an ‘8’, and, further, he was so absorbed by the visual qualities that he would not notice simple arithmetical progressions. The peculiarly vivid use of mental images by Antipheron and by Luria’s patient should provide a warning as regards those eighteenthand nineteenth-century empiricist philosophers who supposed that normal mental operations all involve the manipulation of mental imagery. The abnormal cases just mentioned, in which mental operations all do work this way, help us to see how handicapped we would be if we were all like this. The uneasy fears of image theorists are here realised in actual practice. They have had difficulty in distinguishing different types of mental operations from one another. It is striking that people whose abnormal mental operations really did require them to exploit images had this same difficulty themselves. I shall return to the subject of mental images below. When I remember something, do I remember my past encounter with it? Several critics – John Cooper, Christopher Rowe and Julia Annas3 – urged me to make more of my point (pp. 7, 9-10 and 68) that Aristotle sometimes seems to assume that one remembers something by remembering that one encountered it before, or even remembering the encounter. The latter would protect Aristotle from my charge (pp. 68-9), of overlooking that there is not always a past object of memory, but only a past encounter causing the present awareness. Aristotle would say that the past encounter always serves as a past object of awareness, not, as I maintained, merely as a past cause. And this x

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idea that the past encounter is remembered may also make it easier for him to suppose that remembering always involves a mental image. Does one in fact remember one’s past encounter? I do not believe that Plato claims this in his theory of recollection in the Meno or Phaedo, although his Phaedrus may suggest it more, and I also do not believe that it is true. When one remembers a scene, one may be likely to remember it from one’s previous point of view, but this falls short of remembering the actual viewing. Norman Malcolm has explicitly rejected the claim that when I remember, say, a plane crash which I saw, I must remember my seeing of it.4 There is a case in which it is especially problematic to suppose that I remember my past experience of what I remember, and that is when what I am remembering is itself an experience. Surely I need not remember, in addition to my experience, the experiencing of my experience. To borrow an example from Sartre in Being and Nothingness, I hear the clock strike three without paying attention, but if asked what time it is shortly afterwards, I can recall hearing the three strokes. I recall the hearing, but I need not, however, recall experiencing the hearing, since I was not at the time conscious of hearing.5 The idea that I must recall experiencing the experience was used by the Indian philosopher Dinnaga of the sixth century AD, to generate an infinite regress, and so support his idea that experiences are selfintimating. Jonardon Ganeri, who reports this,6 offers an explanation of the situation. The demand for a past experience of what is remembered is for a link between what is remembered and the present memory. But in the case of remembering one’s own experiences, no such link is needed, since one’s own past experiences are already available to one’s present memory. ‘Philoponus’ in DA 466,30ff. recognises that one might see a person but not be aware of having seen them until later. But Aristotle appears to rule this out by insisting that when one sees, one inevitably perceives that one sees (EN 9.9, 1170a29-b1; Sens 7, 448a 26-30). Mental images A major discussion has concerned whether mental images are needed in imagination, and if so, whether they are like pictures. I took Aristotle to believe that pictorial images are involved in all thinking and memory, in which I thought he was wrong, but not necessarily (p. 72) in all imagination, phantasia. Some philosophers have taken the very xi

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strong view that in imagination it would be impossible to have anything like a pictorial image and the viewing of it.7 But these discussions were not aware of the psychological literature on the great diversity of types of mental image, eidetic, mnemonic and so on. The interest was not in mental images for their own sake, but only as a possible threat to the elimination of what Gilbert Ryle called ‘the ghost in the machine’. Mental images sounded like immaterial ghosts, and therefore, it was thought, needed to be analysed away in a materialistic age, even if not by Ryle’s behaviouristic analysis. The early attempts took no account of the kind of things that mnemonists say about their images, nor of what is said about the eidetic imagery that was much studied in the 1920s,8 and said to be very common in children under the age of twelve. The modern accounts claimed that mental images cannot be rechecked to eliminate errors of viewing, by making them brighter or by taking a closer look. They claimed that there are no spatial relations between their parts, or between them and physical space, so that one cannot shrink, or enlarge, or erase components. They claimed that one does not use one’s eyes. They claimed that images, unlike canvasses, do not have properties of their own such as being white or flat. One sceptic about mental images declared that such talk, if it occurred, would persuade him to change his mind. Well, all these things are said as a matter of course by those who have eidetic or mnemonic images. According to what is said by those who have such images, in eidetic imagery an image of a flat sword may be seen to curve against the walls of the room. Separate groups of dots seen in a picture can be imaged as combining until they form a numeral. The stripes in an imaged cat’s tail can be counted, recounted and checked against the original picture. There is talk of pressure or tension in the eyes, and in dreams there are eyeball movements,9 while the eyes of others water and smart when they image the sun. For after-images (which, however, Aristotle classes at On Dreams 2, 460b3 as aisthêmata, not phantasmata) one’s reports can be checked against chemically explicable regularities about how the images change over time.10 In mnemonic systems, the relative sizes of images are adjusted to make room for items to stand out better, crowding is discouraged, items are standardly erased, fog and smoke are avoided in the image, an imaged lamp can be brought up to illuminate what is obscure. Items may come to be noticed or cease to be noticed in predictable and checkable ways, as the background colour changes to increase or xii

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reduce contrast. At the very least, sceptics ought surely to offer convincing reinterpretations of such talk. In one way the situation has improved, in that more recent psychological literature has been noticed and addressed. I am thinking, for example, of the well-named work of the psychologist Stephen M. Kosslyn, Ghosts in the Mind’s Machine, and ‘On the demystification of mental imagery’. His work is summarised in his Image and Mind.11 But the ensuing discussion has been of a rather different character, since images or ‘representations’ have been treated as postulates explaining what Kosslyn’s subjects do with their mental images, and often as representations in the brain, not as mental images of which the subjects are themselves aware. The debate centres on whether these postulated brain images are pictorial, or of a more linguistic character. Against pictorial images, some of the old objections are repeated. Images cannot be viewed or seen; they are merely had. Images have no spatial properties. Other properties ascribed to them can be reinterpreted. For example, talk of a green image is best construed as concerning an image of a green thing.12 Thus the case against the possibility of pictorial mental images seems to me not to have developed much further. Not that I believe that such images explain normal mental operations. In ordinary perception, for example, it leads to a difficulty if we say that images are seen, for then the problem arises when we ever get to see tables and chairs, since we don’t normally see two different kinds of things simultaneously. In ordinary perception of tables and chairs, it may be much better to say that images, if they play a role at all, are had, and to understand this as meaning that they provide a mechanism, not an object, for our perception. Further, even when someone describes their experience, as mnemonists and eideticists do, in terms of seeing pictures, for example in terms of seeing a green image to the left of a red image, it is still fair to raise a query. May they not be describing how they are experiencing something, rather than what they are experiencing? The pictorial image of which they speak may be cited only to describe a mode of experiencing. Moreover, if their talk can be reinterpreted as meaning that the experience is merely like that of seeing a picture, no picture need be supposed to exist, and their attention may really be directed to something quite different. Nonetheless, this is so far a question. It is one thing to say that what we experience does not have to be pictures, but another to say that it cannot be. xiii

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Since eideticists and mnemonists believe that they are viewing images, which may be curved in spite of being images of flat things, and green in spite of being of red things – images which can be scanned for information and re-scanned, and whose parts can be made more or less visible – there is a need, as I said, to show convincingly how and why their talk must be reinterpreted, and I am not sure that modern discussions have succeeded in showing this. After all, the eideticists and mnemonists need not be ascribing to their mental images any high level of reality independent of their own minds. So I do not feel that there is any need to reinterpret Aristotle as not intending literally the idea of physically based mental pictures. Since he was much more familiar than the present age with mnemonic imagery and is actually discussing it, I would not have a prior expectation of his sharing the modern interest in reinterpreting such talk, and I see no sign that he did reinterpret it. The problem with images, to my mind, is not that they cannot be viewed like pictures, but that such pictorial imagery does not explain ordinary imagination perception, or remembering. The abnormal cases of Antipheron of Oreus and of Luria’s patient, described above, help to illustrate this. I believe the fact is that only some people use pictorial mental images in imagining or remembering. When they do, the mere occurrence of the image could be a form of remembering. But reading information off the image, so far from being a case of remembering, would depend on remembering what stands for what and many other things, not all of which could be remembered through further picturing on pain of regress. Aristotle’s phantasma Nonetheless, some interpreters of Aristotle have denied that for him the phantasma in imagination is, or is always, like a viewed picture, and a major motive, at least in Martha Nussbaum’s case,13 was to avoid saddling him with a philosophically unsatisfactory view. She understands the phantasma as merely being what appears, which does not have to be a mental image, and Malcolm Schofield14 takes it as an appearance for the different purpose of trying to make Aristotle’s treatment of phantasia more self-consistent. There is another interpretation of Aristotle’s phantasma almost the opposite of this one, but which gets the same result that, as explicitly stressed, phantasmata are not themselves viewed, nor are they tiny xiv

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pictures that look like objects in the world. It is suggested by this interpretation that Aristotle uses the word phantasma only for the underlying physiological trace in imagination and memory.15 Although this would in some ways align Aristotle more with the materialistic interests of modern philosophers and with their beliefs about what actually exists, which may be part of the motive, I do not think that it fits Aristotle. He himself would hold that the relevant physiological trace is only the material cause, whereas he begins On the Soul by explaining (1.1, 403a3-b19) that his subject matter is affections of the soul which have both a material cause and a formal cause. This is not to say that Aristotle treats the formal cause in anything remotely like Descartes’ way as a purely mental entity infallibly introspectible, as I have stressed elsewhere.16 Of course, Aristotle does discuss the material cause of the phantasma, especially at On Memory 450a32-b11. But, contrary to the present interpretation, he treats it too as like the pictorial imprint of a signet ring (450a27-32 with 450b2-3) only located in the heart. Further, he insists all the time, as in On the Soul 1.1, that the picture-like thing is in the soul as well as the body (On Memory 450a28-9; 450b10-11; 451a3), and he goes on to describe how we view it (theôrein, theorêma: 450b18, 26, 30, 451a7-8, a12, a13), whereas it is agreed that one could not view merely physiological imprints inside one’s heart, at least not with the instruments available in Aristotle’s day. Although those imprints, which serve as the material cause of the phantasma, are located in the heart, this does not mean that the phantasma which one views is located there. It is rather in the soul, and if it is viewed as being anywhere, it is viewed as if it were before the eyes. I do not know any passage where Aristotle uses the word phantasma for the merely physiological imprint, which does not ‘appear’17 – and its not appearing is why I say that this interpretation is the opposite of the one that makes the phantasma an appearance. When discussing the material cause of the phantasma, Aristotle chooses words other than phantasma, for example kinêsis. Aristotle’s comparison with the imprint of a pictorial signet ring ought nowadays to be thought less plausible in application to the physiological trace than in application to the mental image. Although many writers speak of a representation in the brain, far fewer are attracted to thinking of this as like a picture.18 I would myself distinguish between phantasia and phantasma. I entirely agree that Aristotle’s phantasia is best understood in terms xv

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of what appears, and that appearances do not, at least in the view I share, always take the form of images. But the phantasma involved in memory and thinking is taken in Aristotle’s On Memory to be an image like a picture. The affection in soul and body is like a sort of picture the having of which, we say, is memory (450a28-30). It is an imprint of the aisthêma like the mark of a signet ring (450a30-2). For the image to remain in the soul, the body must supply a receptive surface (450a32-b11). The affection is like an imprint or drawing in us (450b15-16). There is an extensive comparison with a figure drawn on a panel, or a drawing, which is a copy (eikôn: b20-4, b30-451a2). So too the phantasma in memory is a copy (eikôn), and can be viewed as such (450b27, b30, 451a2). Indeed, that is why Antipheron of Oreus – mentioned above – thought he was remembering, because he viewed his phantasmata as copies when they were not. As we saw above, the phantasmata are repeatedly described as something viewed (theôrein, theorêma). The mnemonic images of Chapter 2 are certainly pictorial at 452a13, where the value of starting from a place is mentioned, and at 452a17-30, where I believe the letters represent places. Thinking too is said at 449b30-450a14 to involve a phantasma, which here too is compared to a drawn diagram such as a triangle (450a1-4). In thinking, we are said to ‘place [the phantasma] before our eyes’, and, just as with the drawn triangle, to attend only to those features that are currently relevant to our thought, not, for example, to its having a size, or to its having a particular size (450a4-7). Aristotle has committed himself, then, to picture-like images for memory and thinking, and also for the purely imaginative images of Antipheron of Oreus. All these phantasmata are provided by phantasia. If, as most modern commentators, myself included, believe, this is a mistake, is it worth trying to protect Aristotle from endorsing the same mistake in other cases of phantasia, especially when he gives us no warning that phantasma means anything different in the other cases? Is this not a case of shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted? Aristotle’s acceptance of pictorial images for such a wide range of cases may, as I suggested, have been encouraged by his awareness of the pictorial images of mnemonists, and, I would add, by his experience of the pitfalls of tragic composition. Thus, to avoid notorious oversights in staging, he recommends in Poetics 17, 1455a22-6, that the playwright ‘places before his eyes’ the scene he is composing as vividly as possible. xvi

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One passage that has motivated people to try to dissociate Aristotle’s concept of phantasma from pictorial images is On the Soul 3.3, 428a1-2, where Aristotle says, ‘if, then, phantasia is the faculty by which we say that a phantasma occurs to us, and not what we talk of by way of metaphor ...’. Here the phantasia that he goes on to discuss includes all kinds of appearances which seem to have nothing to do with pictorial mental images, and yet he seems to have tied this varied phantasia to phantasma. This creates a philosophical motive for wanting to weaken the idea of phantasma here, so that it means merely what appears, or refers merely to the non-appearing physiological trace. But there may be another way of getting the desired result, if we may weaken the link of phantasia to phantasma by using Martha Nussbaum’s clever suggestion (p. 254) about what the metaphorical use is, in a way that she did not intend. She suggests that the metaphorical meaning might be ostentatiousness. That would free us to suppose that Aristotle is telling us that one, but only one, of the things that phantasia in the literal sense can do is to supply a phantasma, in the sense of picture-like image. We need not suppose, I suggest, that this is what phantasia in the literal sense always does; it is merely the thing relevant to what is currently under discussion, thinking, because thinking, we have seen, does for Aristotle require a picture-like mental image. The result will be that Aristotle does not silently abandon his conception of phantasma as picture-like mental image, but he also does not make all phantasia involve such an image. Certain passages have been used to cast doubt on the phantasma always being a pictorial mental image, but Pamela Huby has defended me as regards one passage, On Dreams 462a18.19 In this passage, Aristotle has been taken to be applying the word phantasma not to an image, but to a lamp half-seen through sleep by someone on the point of waking up. But Huby points out that Aristotle is probably at 462a18 denying that the lamp is a phantasma (‘Nor is everything that is experienced in sleep a phantasma’, rather than ‘Nor is every phantasma that occurs in sleep [a dream]’). Nussbaum draws attention to some interesting evidence that might seem to point in the opposite direction from mine, although here too I take it differently. I do not interpret the thing viewed, the theorêma and noêma at On Memory 450a26 and 451a1, as referring to a different entity from the phantasma. But very interesting is her reference to On the Movement of Animals 8, 702a5, which, however, I take to xvii

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be referring to a tactile mental image, when it says that the memory or anticipation of passionate events uses the physiological heating and cooling that underlies passion as an image (eidôlon) of the passionate occurrences remembered or anticipated. Images are further postulated by Aristotle for estimating timelapses in On Memory 2, 452b7-453a4. Many reconstructions have been offered of the diagram in this passage. I think the suggestion in my text is probable, that one is expected to make timed mental movements of some sort, either movements along the lines AB, BH, in which case these lines are part of what one has imaged, or movements through a series of images, in which case these lines need not themselves be imaged, but merely represent the duration of the imagings. In addition, there is a multiplier, the disparate quantities Q and I or K, and L. There should be no need for any mental movement along these multipliers, for they could be imaged lines whose length reveals how much multiplication must be applied to the time spent on AB,BH. But it is not clear whether Aristotle realised this, partly because it is not clear whether he is thinking of Q and I as lines or as movements (more than one noun could be read into the Greek). My translation ‘changes’ is meant to be neutral. This last example of a phantasma has been used to draw a different conclusion in a magisterial article by Victor Caston.20 As already mentioned, he takes the phantasma to be not a viewable image, but just a physiological trace. His further idea is that not even the trace is picture-like, but simply records a mathematical ratio, just as it does in the special case of estimating time lapses. This fits with a suggestion he makes about sense perception Adjudicating the controversy about whether sense perception involves a physiological process at all, and if so, of what sort, he suggests that seeing, for example, does not, as I have suggested, involve the eye jelly receiving patches of borrowed colour matching the observed scene. All the organ need receive is ratios, since for Aristotle, each shade of colour is a ratio of the darkest to the brightest. The organ needs to receive the right ratios, but not as a ratio of colours. It could, for example, take on a ratio of temperatures, so long as the ratio was mathematically the same as that of the colour perceived. A uniform treatment can then be given to perception and memory. For, if the phantasma which uses ratios for estimating time lapse can be taken as typical of all memory phantasmata, then the memory phantasma of the man Corsicus, which Aristotle discusses in On Memory 1, 450a25-451a2, will xviii

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also be confined to recording ratios. There is no ratio corresponding to the man Corsicus, but there will be ratios corresponding to the colours and other sensible qualities in my earlier view of Corsicus. This interpretation offers a bold and interesting synthesis of perception and memory, but I have not seen much incentive to think that it is only ratios which have been imprinted in us. The description of the memory phantasma as like a picture suggests that at least the outline shape of Corsicus might be imprinted in the imagination and the heart. Phantasma in thinking I have said above that Aristotle connects thinking with a phantasma, at On Memory 1, 449b30-450a14, where the phantasma is compared to a drawn diagram such as a triangle. In fact, he says that all thinking involves a phantasma (see here and On the Soul 3.7,431a16; 431b2; 3.8, 432a3-14).He gives a metaphysical reason for thought requiring a mental image at On the Soul 432a3-10, among the other reasons listed below on pp. 5-7. The reason is that no object of thought can exist, as the Platonic Forms were thought to, separately from extended perceptibles. In fact, however, images are only one of several things that house the objects of thought. The location of both geometrical objects of thought, like curves, and natural objects of thought, like snubness of nose, is in physical objects, from which they cannot exist separately, although geometrical objects of thought are separated by us in thought (e.g. On the Soul 3.7, 431b15-16), in the sense that we think of geometrical circles without thinking of the matter in which they reside. Even natural objects of thought get separated from matter in a different way. Although in thinking of snubness, we think of the nose in which it resides, and in thinking of stones, we think of their matter, the matter of a stone is not actually received in the soul, but only its form, or defining characteristics (On the Soul 3.8, 431b28432a1). Thus in a sense, objects of thought have several locations. They reside in physical objects, but the sensible forms within which they reside are received by our sense organs in perception, and after perception is over, the objects of thought reside in images (On the Soul 3.8, 432a4-10) and we think them within images (On the Soul 3.7, 431b2). And the thinking part of the soul is the place of these forms in which it receives them (On the Soul 3.4, 429a15; a27). At xix

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one point, Aristotle describes how thought can actualise a line in a seen (idein) diagram, even if it had not been drawn (Metaphysics 9.9, 1051a21-33). Although such a line is produced by thought, it can reside in a diagram in the sand. We might compare how the equator resides on the surface of the earth, even though it too is a product of thought, and might in another sense be said to exist in our minds. Phantasia as lacking objects Two very good points have been made about objects of phantasia by Michael Wedin and Victor Caston.21 Wedin notices that phantasia is not a faculty in the sense of having its own objects, as required at Plato Republic 477C and Aristotle On the Soul 2.4, 415a20-2. Instead, phantasia supplies representations to other such faculties. Caston points out that Aristotle’s phantasia avoids depending like the five senses on direct stimulation by existent objects. He suggests that Aristotle was alive to some of the problems about non-existent objects that later philosophers, from the Stoics onwards, tried to address by postulating intentional objects. Aristotle instead postulates phantasia as a faculty not requiring currently existing objects. This excellent point does not require us to reject the idea that phantasmata are pictorial images, since phantasmata are not objects of phantasia, but simply a means by which it apprehends other objects. They do not therefore violate the observation that phantasia lacks its own existent objects. Animal memory Aristotle argues at 449b30-450a14 that memory, even memory of objects of thought, belongs to the perceptive, not to the intellectual, part of the soul. His theory of memory as needing a phantasma – imagery – forms the basis of this argument. From it he concludes (450a15) that memory is therefore available to some non-human animals. This kind of taxonomical distinction is important to Aristotle as a biologist. But if memory involves saying in your soul (449b20-3) and in fact perceiving (450a19-21) that you have encountered the remembered thing before, how can sub-human animals do this? I have discussed this in Animal Minds and Human Morals, chs 2-3. Aristotle, unlike Plato Theaetetus 184D-187B, allows perception, including animal perception, to grasp propositions, without any xx

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aid from reason. The lion perceives that the ox is near, and rejoices that he will have a meal (Nicomachean Ethics 3.10, 1118a20-2). How can the lion do this, if he does not have the concept of an ox? One modern answer would be that one can perceive a mountain as having a certain complex crinkly shape without having the concept of any shape so complicated. So the lion might equally have a nonconceptual awareness of the ox as near. But Aristotle’s own answer is different. He allows in Metaphysics 1.1, 980b25-6, that some animals have some experience (empeiria). And in Posterior Analytics 2.19, 100a5-8, experience, say, of oxen is equated on the one hand with many memories of oxen, and on the other hand with (I take the ‘or’ at line 6 to mean ‘i.e.’, not ‘or rather’) a rudimentary universal (katholou) concept of oxen. In other words, an animal can have an empirically gained concept of oxen that consists merely of many memories of them. On Aristotle’s view, then, your initial memories could not involve concepts, but later ones, when you had built up enough memories, could. And the lion could deploy empirically gained concepts in its memories, despite lacking reason. In this way Aristotle makes the lion capable of perceiving that the ox is near, without ascribing to it any faculties higher than the perceptual faculty. He would have been horrified at the Platonist tendency, based on Plato Theaetetus 184-7, to allow the higher faculty of reason in humans to permeate lower ones. Thus Aristotle assigns perception of time in On Memory 450a10-11, and elsewhere awareness of one’s own perceptions, to the general perceptual faculty. Many commentators take this to be what he calls the ‘common sense’. ‘Simplicius’ (who may be Priscian) at in DA 187,27-188,35; 173,3-7, defends Aristotle’s claim that the common sense is responsible for self-awareness by the very un-Aristotelian device of saying that in humans the common sense is permeated by reason. Aristotle wants to keep the faculties separate. Aristotle’s idea that even memory of the objects of thought is a function of perceptual imagery was exploited in the early eleventh century by Avicenna, who argued that the intellect could not think by using forms stored within itself, like the Neoplatonists’ logoi, but needed to unite with the agent intellect referred to by Aristotle in On the Soul 3.5, which was uninterruptedly thinking such forms.

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Perception of time I have already mentioned Aristotle’s view that time is apprehended22 by perception (On Memory 1, 450a10-11) and is therefore available to some animals, and his view that we can use images for assessing distance into the past (2, 452b7-453a4). He thinks in Physics 4.10, 218b21-219a6, that we perceive time not directly, but by perceiving motion, although the motion can be a mental one (219a2). But those who go to have curative sleeps in the caves of Sardinia are aware of no movement, not even mental, and therefore not of the passage of time. Elsewhere, however, in On Sense Perception 7, 448a26-30, he seems to contradict this by rejecting the view of the pseudo-Aristotelian de Audibilibus 803b36, that there are imperceptibly small times, and rejects it on the grounds that it would have the intolerable result that for those periods we would fail to perceive our own existence, even in the weak sense introduced at On Sense Perception 6, 445b11ff., of the short period contributing to perception over a longer period. Against the need to perceive motion I have argued in Time, Creation and the Continuum, pp. 74-8, that time might rather be perceived directly in the absence of motion, and that beings who had a sense like vision except for being independent of the motion of light, could perceive a motionless universal freeze, in which even their thoughts were frozen, although they would only recognise its occurrence retrospectively, after comparing notes, and could not estimate its length, since no clocks would have operated. Despite Aristotle’s saying that time is known not by reason, but by the primary perceptive faculty, there is a worry in Themistius in DA 120, 10-17; Priscian in Theophrastum 4, 20-2; ‘Philoponus’ in DA 3, 579,39-581,19; 586,19-27, whether reason is needed after all, on two grounds, neither of them adequate. First, Aristotle says that appetite (epithumia) opposes reason, but only in those animals that perceive time, because intellect is concerned with the future, appetite with what is already the case (to êdê), DA 3.10, 433b5-10. But this, while giving to intellect some special concern with the future, continues to ascribe awareness of time to perception. And indeed, the commentators point out that irrational animals know when to migrate, and even in some cases store up food for the future, or avoid a future wound. Or is the lion, ‘Philoponus’ asks, merely restrained from attacking by a trace in its imagination of a past wound? This would be like xxii

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knowing that there are too many beasts for a safe attack on them, but not being able to count that there are three, since counting requires reason. Counting is relevant to the second worry, because Aristotle defines time as the countable aspect of a process, Phys. 4.11, 219b2 and it is intellect (nous) that counts, 4.14, 223a25-6. But for perceiving time, less than counting is required, given the point already made that one need do no more than perceive a mental process within. One may also be perceiving a physical process such as the movement of the celestial clock, but perceiving that, for Aristotle, involves also being aware of the mental process of perceiving. In the process perceived we can recognise more than one stage, and when we do, we recognise the passage of time. This is not yet to require that we have to count the stages, as opposed to recognising (as a lion can) that there is more than one. It is the existence of time, not the perception of it, that, according to Aristotle, introduces a requirement of counting, and even this is only, 4.14, 223a21-9, of the possibility of counting. The fullest treatment is in ‘Philoponus’, who deserves to be quoted at least in part (Commentary on De Anima 3, 579,39-581,19, translated by William Charlton): There are two hazardous things in this syllogism. One is that since he says that where there is consciousness of time there must be reason and appetite, from this it may be concluded that only human beings have consciousness of time. Against this we see that non-rational beings too are conscious of time. That is shown by the crane’s flying off in winter to Thrace, and the ant’s storing up in advance a treasury of nourishment for the winter. ... [27-37] The third solution is that by ‘time’ Aristotle means determinate time, not indeterminate. In this way, at least, he says in the De Interpretatione [16a13-18], ‘some simply, some in time’ meaning by ‘simply’ indeterminate time, and by ‘in time’ determinate time. Non-rational beings, then, even if they have consciousness of time, do not have consciousness of determinate time, but are conscious only of winter, say, or summer. Human beings have consciousness of determinate time because they count off days and hours. Counting is proper only to the rational soul. On this account, then, he says that only man has consciousness of determinate time, for non-rational beings too have consciousness of indeterminate. That is how he resolves the first point. ... [581,7-19] Let us suppose that a lion attacking a flock is wounded, and then later wants to attack another flock, but fearing the wound it received before, it does not attack so as not to suffer the same thing again. You see that it considers about the future so as not to suffer. So non-rational animals too occupy

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themselves with the future. Against this the commentators (exêgêtai) offer the defence that considering about the future on the basis of the past belongs to reason alone. The lion, at least, does not take thought in advance for the future on the basis of the past; it is changed in accordance with imagination, since having a trace left behind of the [former] wound, it is restrained from attacking the flock for fear of a present wound. So it is active only about what is present. There is in it no discrimination of time any more than of number. The lion does not know what 2 is or 3, but only many and fewness, as is shown by its attacking a few, but fearing many.

Notes 1. A.R. Luria, The Mind of a Mnemonist, London, 1969. 2. Ulrich Voigt, Esels Welt: Mnemotechnik zwischen Simonides und Harry Lorayne, 2001, and Sabine Vogt, forthcoming. 3. Julia Annas in a self-standing article, ‘Aristotle on memory and the self’, in Martha Nussbaum, Amelie Rorty, eds, Essays on Aristotle’s De Anima, Oxford, 1992, 1995, revised from Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 4, 1986, 99-117, the others in reviews of the book. 4. Norman Malcolm, Memory, Ithaca, NY, 1977, 24. 5. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, Introduction. 6. Jonardon Ganeri, ‘Self-intimation, memory and personal identity’, Journal of Indian Philosophy 27, 1999, 469-83. 7. Notable examples of this view were Gilbert Ryle, Concept of Mind, London, 1949, ch. 8; Hidé Ishiguro in B.A.O. Williams, A. Montefiore, eds, British Analytical Philosophy, 1966; Hidé Ishiguro, ‘Imagination’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1967; Michael Shorter, Mind 61, 1952. Sartre and Wittgenstein are on the same side. 8. Gordon Allport, ‘Eidetic imagery’, British Journal of Psychology, 1924. 9. A special treatment is given to eyeball movements by Norman Malcolm, Dreaming, London, 1959. 10. G.S. Brindley, ‘After images’, Scientific American, October 1963. 11. Stephen M. Kosslyn, Ghosts in the Mind’s Machine, New York, 1983; ‘On the demystification of mental imagery’, in Ned Block, ed., Imagery, Cambridge, Mass., 1981. His work is summarised in his Image and Mind, Cambridge, Mass., 1980. 12. Sophisticated consideration is given to Kosslyn and others by Michael Tye, The Imagery Debate, Cambridge, Mass., 1991; Ned Block, ‘Mental pictures and cognitive science’, Philosophical Review 92, 1983; Ned Block, ed., Imagery, Cambridge, Mass., 1981. 13. Martha Nussbaum, Aristotle’s De Motu Animalium, Princeton, 1978, essay 5. 14. Malcolm Schofield, ‘Aristotle on the imagination’, in G.E.R. Lloyd, G.E.L. Owen, eds, Aristotle on Mind and the Senses, Cambridge, 1978, 99-140. 15. Julia Annas as above, p. 304 = pp. 107-8 of the original; Victor Caston, ‘Why Aristotle needs imagination’, Phronesis 41, 1996, 20-55, at 51-2. 16. Richard Sorabji, ‘Body and soul in Aristotle’, in Jonathan Barnes, Mal-

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colm Schofield, Richard Sorabji, eds, Articles on Aristotle vol. 4, 1979, 42-64, reprinted from Philosophy 49, 1974, 63-89. 17. I take it that the phantasmata and movements which are sometimes disturbed and sometimes altogether effaced (aphanizontai pampan) in On Dreams, 461a14-22, do not exist as phantasmata when they are altogether effaced. 18. Even those who describe it as ‘analogue’ rather than ‘digital’ are not making so straightforward a comparison with pictures as Aristotle does. 19. Pamela Huby, ‘Aristotle, De Insomniis 462a18’, Classical Quarterly 25, 1975, 151-2. 20. Victor Caston, ‘The spirit and the letter, Aristotle on perception’, in Ricardo Salles, ed., Metaphysics, Soul and Ethics: Themes from the Work of Richard Sorabji, forthcoming, Oxford University Press, 2004. 21. Michael Wedin, Mind and Imagination in Aristotle, New Haven, Ct., 1988; Victor Caston, ‘Aristotle and the problem of intentionality’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 58, 1998, 249-98. 22. On this subject, see Stephan Eberle, ‘Le problème de la perception du temps et la théorie de l’intentionnalité chez Aristote’, in Bjarne Melkevik, JeanMarc Narbonne, eds, Une philosophie dans l’histoire. Hommages à Raymond Klibansky, Quebec, 2000; J.-L. Labarrière, ‘Sentir le temps, regarder un tableau, Aristote et les images de la mémoire’, in C. Darbo-Peschanski, ed., Constructions du temps dans le monde grec ancien, Paris, 2000, 269-83; Daniela Taormina, ‘Perception du temps et mémoire chez Aristote. De memoria et reminiscentia 1’, Philosophie Antique 2, 2002, 33-61; G. Verbeke, ‘La perception du temps chez Aristote’, in Aristotelica. Mélanges offerts à Marcel de Corte, Brussels, Liège, 1985, 351-77.

The translation The corrigenda listed below include some corrections to the translation, and I want to thank John Cooper, Rosamund Kent Sprague and Christopher Rowe for suggestions made in their reviews. A Czech translation by Martin Pokorny was published in 1995. Corrigenda to the text of the first edition p. 17, n. 2, last line: for ‘forthcoming’ read ‘Philosophy 49, 1974, 63-89, repr. in Jonathan Barnes, Malcolm Schofield, Richard Sorabji, eds, Articles on Aristotle, vol. 4, 1979, 42-64’ p. 35, first heading: after ‘anamimnêskesthai’ add ‘being reminded’ p. 47, para 3: for ‘449a9’ read ‘449b9’ p. 48, lines 5-6: for ‘he always says ... thought this before’ read ‘in these circumstances he always says in his soul that he heard, or perceived, or thought this before’ p. 49, para 3, line 2: for ‘animals’ read ‘beings’ p. 51, line 1: for ‘if it is’ read ‘if it is similar,’ p. 51, para beginning 450b20, lines 9-13: for ‘So again ... as a copy,’ read ‘So

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again when the change connected with the image is active, if the soul perceives the image as something in its own right, it appears to come to one as a thought or image. But if the soul perceives the image as being of another thing, and (just as in the case of the drawing) one contemplates it as a copy,’ p. 55, line 5: for ‘in this way they recollect’ read ‘they recollect in the same way’ p. 57, line 9: for ‘from the one place’ read ‘to itself’ p. 60, line 5: for ‘someone’s’ read ‘their’ p. 79, para 3, line 2: for ‘For one thing, the’ read ‘The’ p. 79, para 3, line 4: after ‘unexpected’ add ‘, except that, as William Fortenbaugh has pointed out to me, God may be included among the intelligent beings of 450a16’ p. 80, para 3, line 4: for ‘450a2-14’ read ‘451a2-14’ p. 118, last line: for ‘forthcoming’ read ‘Philosophy 49, 1974, 63-89, repr. in Jonathan Barnes, Malcolm Schofield, Richard Sorabji, eds, Articles on Aristotle, vol. 4, London, 1979, 42-64’

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