Aristotle: Aesthetics and philosophy of mind

Aristotle: Aesthetics and philosophy of mind David Gallop AESTHETICS Aesthetics, as that field is now understood, does not form the subjectmatter of any single Aristotelian work. No treatise is devoted to such topics as the essential nature of a work of art, the function of art in general, the differences between art and craft, or the concepts of meaning and truth in the arts. Nor does Aristotle anywhere examine, in a general way, the status of what would now be called ‘aesthetic judgments’, or seek a rational foundation on which they might be based. He hardly even possessed a vocabulary in which such questions could be raised. His writings nevertheless contain some of the most suggestive and influential remarks concerning the arts that have ever been penned. These are to be found mainly in the Poetics,¹ a short treatise on poetic composition, from which only the first of two books has survived. That work has provided principles of criticism which have lasting interest and relevance, not only for drama and epic, but for literary genres unknown to Aristotle himself, and also, though to a lesser extent, for the non-literary arts. The most convenient starting point for consideration of Aristotelian aesthetics is provided by Plato’s treatment of the arts (cf. Routledge History of Philosophy, vol.I, ch. 12), and especially by his notorious banishment of poetry from the ‘ideal state’ depicted in his Republic. Plato’s own poetic impulse had evidently been a source of severe internal conflict. Especially in Republic X, his attack had been so vehement, and framed in such personal terms (for example 595b–c, 607e–608b), as to suggest that in banishing poetry he was renouncing an ardent passion of his own. Poetry had been branded as the arch-enemy of philosophy, and Socrates made to speak of a ‘long-standing quarrel’ between them (607b). Yet Plato would spare poetry if he could. For, in closing, he had made Socrates challenge lovers of poetry ‘to speak on its behalf in prose’, and to show ‘that it is not only pleasant but beneficial’ (607d–e). The Poetics is, in effect, a response to that challenge. It is true that Plato is nowhere named in the treatise, and that Aristotle does not expressly claim to be answering him. Nevertheless, in the dry phrases of the Poetics and in its major contentions we can hear the elements of just such a prose defence of poetry as Plato had invited. The Poetics and ‘poetry’ The treatise begins with a survey of poetry in relation to other art forms, a classification of its principal genres (chapters 1–3), and a short history of their development (chapters 4–5). The bulk of the extant work is devoted to a discussion of tragedy (chapters 6–22), followed by a shorter treatment of epic (chapters 23–4), solutions to some problems in literary criticism (chapter 25), and a comparative evaluation of tragedy and epic (chapter 26). The lost portion of the work probably included a discussion of comedy (promised at 49b21–2). The project of the Poetics is announced in its opening sentence. Aristotle there proposes to consider ‘the poetic craft itself and its species, the power (dunamis) that each species possesses, and how plots should be put together if the composition is going to prove successful’ (47a1–3). It is significant that plot-construction is introduced at the outset. For this at once reveals how Aristotle conceived of the subject. That subject was not ‘poetry’ as we now use the term. The noun poiêsis was formed on the verb poiein, which meant, quite generally, ‘to make’. Although the noun can bear the wider sense of ‘making’, it was often used specifically for composition in verse, a curious narrowing of usage noticed in Plato’s Symposium (205c–d). In the same context Plato had assimilated poetic composition to various other forms of creative activity, regarded as so many different expressions of love. But he had not challenged the limitation of literary poiêsis to metrical verse. Aristotle does challenge this. On the first page of the Poetics he mentions the pre-Socratic cosmologist Empedocles. Although that thinker had composed his account of the world in Homeric hexameters, he deserves to be called a natural scientist rather than a poet (47b18–20). Later (51b2–4) Aristotle observes that if the works of the historian Herodotus were put into verse, they would still be ‘history of a sort’. On the other hand, the mimes of Sophron and Xenarchus and Socratic dialogues, dramatic sketches and conversations in prose, are mentioned (47b10–11) as if they shared something in common with ‘poetic’ art. Metre, therefore, is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for the craft examined in the Poetics. If it is taken for a defining property of ‘poetic’ utterance, it will follow that ‘poetry’ and its cognates are mistranslations of key terms in the treatise. Even the broader English use of ‘poetic’ to mark certain features of diction or style misses what Aristotle treats as central. The Poetics deals mainly with only two genres, epic and tragedy, both of which happen to use metre and poetic language. But those features are, for Aristotle, incidental to their status as poiêsis. What made Homer or Sophocles masters of that craft was their skill in putting together a story. This brings us to the nub of Aristotle’s response to Plato. Plato’s attack was misguided, in Aristotle’s view, because it had misrepresented the nature and the impact of fiction. Aristotle’s project was not, then, to give an account of all that we should call ‘poetry’, but to examine the foundation of the two fictional genres most highly developed in his time. In doing so, he not only ‘answered’ Plato, but became an effective mediator in the ‘long-standing quarrel between poetry and philosophy’. For through his examination of poetic fiction, he showed how an art form, far from being an enemy of philosophy or the sciences, might be seen as their ally. To have shown that was no small contribution towards a philosophy of art. Aristotelian mimêsis In Republic II–III and X Plato had used the concept of mimêsis to denigrate artists and especially poets. The concept is no less central to Aristotle’s aesthetics than it had been to Plato’s. But Aristotle uses it to restore the poets to a place of honour. How does he achieve this? The Poetics begins by classifying the major poetic genres along with music, dance and the visual arts, as so many different forms of mimêsis (47a13–18). These are differentiated according to the media they use (chapter 1), the objects they represent (chapter 2), and their mode of representation (chapter 3). The last of these differentiae turns upon the distinction between poetic narrative and dramatic enactment. Unfortunately, however, the Poetics contains no explicit definition of mimêsis itself. In the broadest terms, we can understand it as ‘making or doing something which resembles something else’ (Lucas [3.6], 259). But that formula is too vague to be useful, and it harbours a tiresome obscurity which bedevils Greek discussions of the whole subject. Mimêsis can mean— as its English derivatives ‘mime’ and ‘mimicry’ suggest—enactment or impersonation. It was upon that sense of mimêsis that Plato had partly relied when he chastised the poets in Republic III (especially 394d–398b) for their use of dramatic enactment: poetry is ‘mimetic’ by virtue of mimicking the words or actions of characters whose roles are enacted. But mimêsis can also mean producing a likeness or representation of some original subject, as painters depict pieces of furniture such as beds and tables, or human figures such as carpenters and cobblers. In the broader polemic of Republic X Plato had condemned poetry as ‘mimetic’, not for its mimicry, but on the wider ground that it represented particular objects, people, scenes or events in the sensible world. This charge had included epic poetry no less than drama. Indeed, by calling Homer ‘the original teacher and leader of all those fine tragedians’ (595c), Plato had deliberately blurred the distinction which he had himself drawn earlier between narrative and enacted modes of poetic fiction (393a–b, cf. 394b– c). Which of the two kinds of mimêsis has Aristotle in mind in the Poetics? With respect to poetry, at least, the answer is not always clear. In his sketch of the early history of poetry (chapter 4) Aristotle traces it to two ‘causes’, both natural (48b5). The first of these is the natural human tendency to ‘imitate’ (mimeisthai), evidenced by the earliest learning of children. Does mimeisthai here mean mimicry or representation? The human species is differentiated from others by virtue of being ‘thoroughly mimetic’ (mimêtikôtaton, 48b7). But does this mean that human beings alone tend to mimic and thereby learn from the behaviour of others, for example in learning to talk? Or does it mean that they alone are given to making likenesses of things, such as pictures or sculptures? The latter characteristic does in fact differentiate them more markedly than the former, since mimicry also occurs in non-human species (cf. Historia Animalium 536b9– 21, 597b22–9). Elsewhere (Politics 1338a40–b2, cf. a17–19) Aristotle urges that children be taught to draw, not for its practical utility but because it makes them observers of physical beauty. When he speaks in the Poetics of ‘the earliest lessons’ of children (48b7–8), he is probably thinking of their drawing, painting or modelling before they learn to read or write. It is clearer that he has representational mimêsis in mind when he turns to the second ‘cause’ for the development of poetry. For this is the human tendency to take pleasure in representational objects (mimêmata), which are exemplified by visual likenesses (48b9–12). Aristotle observes that we delight in viewing precisely detailed likenesses of things, even if their originals are inherently painful. The pleasure is attributed to ‘learning’ and ‘inferring’: ‘it comes about that in viewing they learn and infer what each thing is, for example that this [person] is that one’ (48b16–17). Here the composition of poetic fiction is treated as analogous to drawing or sculpting. We enlarge our understanding of the world both by making representations ourselves and by viewing those made by others. Thus Aristotle accounts for both the impulse to compose fiction and the widespread enjoyment of it. Both are traced to our natural desire to learn. It is often objected that he here places undue emphasis upon mere recognition as a factor in the appreciation of a work of art. Neither artistic merit nor aesthetic pleasure depends upon a work’s recognizable fidelity to a real original. The original may be quite unknown to us, or dead or nonexistent, yet the work may still give pleasure, indeed greater pleasure than many a good likeness of a familiar subject. In reply it is sometimes suggested that what is at issue is the recognition of the likeness as typifying a class of subjects, and as highlighting what is characteristic of that class. Such an interpretation, if it could be squared with the text, would fit neatly with Aristotle’s later contention (51b6–11) that fiction deals with ‘universals’ rather than particulars. The representational work, though it depicts an individual, is of interest as exhibiting features of a type: this is the way that such-and-such people will generally appear or behave. Aristotle’s pronouns are, however, demonstrative, not sortal. So unless we emend them, he is plainly speaking of inferring the identity of an individual: ‘this person (in the portrait) is that person (whom we already know)’. But then what does mere identification of a familiar individual have to do with pleasurable learning from a work of art? Some light is thrown upon Aristotle’s meaning by a closely parallel text from the Rhetoric. Again, since learning and wondering are pleasant, it follows that such things as acts of representation must be pleasant—for instance painting, sculpture, poetic composition—and every product of skilful representation: this latter, even if the object represented is not itself pleasant: for one does not delight in that, but there is an inference that this is that, with the result that one learns something. (1371b4–10, trans. after revised Oxford translation) This passage anticipates the Poetics in stressing ‘inference’ and ‘learning’ from a representation, even of objects that are inherently painful. Its point is not, however, limited to the subjects of human likenesses, since the pronouns in the inference schema (‘this is that’) are neuter. Moreover, the pleasure taken in learning is derived from ‘wonder’. The work prompts its viewers to ask questions of it, and presumably contains features from which answers may be inferred. Thus it both arouses and gratifies human curiosity. The pleasure lies in identifying something that is not expressly named or asserted, but is merely shown. Something is suggested by the representational object, which its viewers can learn only by figuring it out for themselves. In short, a representational work of art demands interpretation. This point is crucial for grasping what is distinctive in the Aristotelian conception of mimêsis. When Aristotle insists upon the mimetic status of poetic fictions, he is, in effect, distinguishing their contents from the declarative assertions of history, philosophy or natural science (cf. Halliwell [3.17], 72–3, 172). By means of that distinction, he effectively undermines Plato’s objection that poetic fiction is inimical to truth. A mimêsis lays no claim to assert truth, because it makes no explicit assertion at all. Whatever truth it contains is merely implicit, and its viewers are left to seek out and identify that truth for themselves. This notion of mimêsis, though visible throughout the Poetics, is especially prominent in Aristotle’s remarks about organic structure in tragic plot (chapters 7–8); in his distinction between poetic fiction and history (chapter 9); and in his concept of mimêsis in epic poetry (chapters 23–4). We shall consider these topics in turn. Organic structure Organic concepts and illustrations occur frequently in the Poetics.² They stem, in part, from Aristotle’s conception of a poetic fiction as a mimêsis of its subject. He thinks of the subject as a living creature, whose likeness the poet aims to capture, as painters aim to capture the likeness of human or animal models. Greek used the same noun (zôion) for ‘picture’ as for ‘animal’, and the Greek word for ‘drawing’ or ‘painting’ (zôgraphia) embodied a connection between those arts and the living subjects they depicted. Accordingly, a representational work must, so far as its medium allows, be so structured as to exhibit the features of the creature which it represents. Plato in the Phaedrus (264b–d cf. 268c–d, 2690) had already observed that in any composition, an organic principle should govern the ordering of the materials. Aristotle uses organic models extensively, especially in Poetics chapters 6–8, to enunciate several broad aesthetic principles, whose influence upon artistic composition and criticism has extended far beyond tragedy. After giving a formal definition of tragedy (49b22–8), he deduces from its essential nature what he calls its six ‘qualitative parts’: plot, character, thought, diction, choral ode and spectacle. As noticed above, the ‘part’ to which he attaches prime importance is plot (muthos), He calls the plot of a tragedy its ‘first principle and, so to speak, its soul’ (50a38–9). The metaphor is derived from his psychology (see pp. 90–104 below). The ‘soul’ (psuchê) of an animal is the ‘form’ of its living body, i.e. the set of powers possessed by the adult member of its species, which determine its physical make-up and direct every stage in its growth. Likewise the plot of a tragedy determines everything that happens in it, shaping the entire action from beginning to end. The primacy of plot is indicated also by a visual analogy. It is compared with an outline sketch of some definite object, in contrast with colours laid on at random (50b1–4). Here the ‘action’ represented by the play is conceived as an organism, whose structure the plot must reveal, just as a black-and-white figure reveals that of an animal. The same idea underlies Aristotle’s directions for plot-structure (chapters 7–8). The action must be ‘complete’ or ‘whole’. ‘Whole’ is explicated in terms of the plot’s containing ‘a beginning, a middle and an end’ (50b26–7). Aristotle thinks of its successive phases as analogous to an animal’s head, trunk and tail. Just as the parts of the animal’s body are connected, so the plot should represent a nexus of events, so arranged that each renders necessary, or at least probable, the one that follows it. Only in this way can a fictional mimêsis exhibit the sorts of causal connection that hold in the real world. Aristotle distinguishes causal order from mere temporal succession (52a18– 21), and sharply criticizes dramatists whose plots are ‘episodic’ (51b33–5). For a disjointed plot, lacking causal connection between its incidents, cannot suggest those general truths about human character and conduct which it is the business of fiction to display. Equally far-reaching are Aristotle’s remarks regarding the proper length for a tragic plot and the criteria for beauty (50b34–51a6). Here the appreciation of a play is expressly compared with the study of an animal. A due proportion or balance between the parts and the whole is of prime importance in the appreciation of beauty, whether in natural objects or in artistic representations of them. The work must therefore be large enough for its parts to be separately discernible, yet not so large that the observer loses all sense of its unity or wholeness. A conspectus of the parts in relation to each other and to the whole is needed for the appreciation of a representational work, just as it is for the observation of an animal. In both cases we need to be able to grasp the contribution made by each element to a well co-ordinated, functioning whole. Aristotle also emphasizes unity in plot. Here too his remarks have a wider aesthetic relevance, although the requirement of unity in drama has sometimes been extended in ways which lack any basis in his text. Nowhere does the Poetics insist upon ‘unity of place’ or ‘unity of time’. All that it demands is ‘unity of action’. Aristotle observes that this is not secured merely by stringing together unrelated episodes in the life of a single individual (51a16–22). Just as, in the composition of an animal, nature makes nothing without a purpose, so each element in a wellstructured plot should be placed where it is for a reason. Everything that happens should have a discernible bearing upon what happens elsewhere in the play. A grasp of those relationships must be possible through a conspectus of the entire work. For only through a survey of the entire action can the viewer draw inferences regarding the import of the play. Because a structured and unified plot displays necessary or probable connections in the real world, the foregoing remarks lead Aristotle directly into his celebrated contrast between ‘poetry’ and history. Poetic fiction and history Whereas the historian’s task is to record events which have occurred, the poet’s is to speak of ‘the kinds of events which could occur and are possible by the standards of probability or necessity’ (51a36–8, trans. Halliwell). Here Aristotle implicitly rejects Plato’s characterization of the poet as a mere ‘imitator’ of sensible particulars. For poetic fiction has a generalizing purpose. It aims to show the sort of thing that happens, by using plot-structures in which the behaviour of certain sorts of agent is displayed (51b6–11). Aristotle has here pinpointed the essential difference between history and fiction. The first duty of historians is not to exhibit general truths, but to record particular events, as they have grounds for believing them to have occurred. Authors of fiction, by contrast, can tailor the events of their stories to exhibit whatever general truths they wish to suggest. This distinction between poetic and historical aims is clearer in comedy than in tragedy, Aristotle remarks (51b11–15), because comedy made more frequent use of invented plots. Thus, ‘poetry is more philosophical and more serious than history, since poetry speaks more of universals, history of particulars’ (51b5–7). Poetic fiction aims to show truths that have a larger significance than particular historical facts, because they emulate the generalizations of scientific theory. Yet we must firmly grasp that a poetic mimêsis does not directly assert, but merely suggests, those truths about character and conduct whose workings it displays. Its audience must infer truths to which its action points, but which it does not expressly affirm. The contrast between fiction and history, Aristotle further argues (51b29–32), need not prevent poets from basing their works upon fact, since real events may be as well suited as fictional ones to show the sort of thing that is likely to happen. ‘Historical fiction’ is not, indeed, a contradiction in terms. If Aristotle took the figures and events of traditional legend to have been real, then most of the tragic repertoire performed in his time would have been, for him, what Shakespeare’s socalled ‘histories’ are for us. A sufficiently powerful fiction may sometimes acquire the status of fact. Shakespeare’s Henry V and Richard III became, respectively, the warrior-hero and the arch-villain of English school history books. Nevertheless, to regard the content of such plays as being straightforwardly ‘affirmed’ by the dramatist is, from Aristotle’s perspective, to misapprehend their purpose altogether. Mimêsis in epic poetry So far we have interpreted Aristotle on the assumption that poetic mimêsis generally means ‘representation’ rather than mimicry. But a vexing passage in his discussion of epic places this once more in doubt. Among Homer’s many other laudable attributes is his grasp—unique among epic poets—of his status as a poet. For the poet should speak as little as possible in his own person, since it is not by virtue of that that he is a mimêtês. (60a5–8, trans. after Halliwell) It is usually supposed that Aristotle here refers to the distinction that Plato had drawn in Republic III between narrative and oratio recta. For Plato had there used the expression ‘speaking in his own person’ (393a6, cf. 394c2–3) to contrast Homer’s narrative sections with the frequent passages in which his characters speak directly. If that is what Aristotle means, then he has switched, without warning, to the sense of mimêsis in which it means ‘mimicry’, and he is suggesting that only in passages of oratio recta is the epic poet a genuine mimêtês. Yet that interpretation creates the utmost difficulty. It restricts mimêsis more narrowly than Aristotle’s usage in the treatise would generally suggest. It is flatly inconsistent with his own earlier distinction between narrative and enactive modes of mimêsis (48a19–29). And it is equally inconsistent with his repeated labelling of epic poetry as ‘narrative mimêsis’ (59a17, 59b33, 59b36–7). Aristotle does not explain the phrase ‘speaking in his own person’, and we need not take him to mean exactly what Plato had meant. He goes on to castigate other epic poets as ‘constantly competing in their own persons’ and as ‘representing few things on few occasions’ (60a8–9). Here, as elsewhere (51a6–11, 51b35–52a1, 53b7–11, 62a5–11), he has his eye on the way in which artistic aims can be perverted by the pressures of performance. He means that inferior poets used a thin plot as a platform from which to harangue the audience in their own voice, instead of allowing a richly elaborated story to makes its own impact, as Homer did. Such an interpretation fits with what we have earlier said of mimêsis. For poets practise it not by virtue of what they directly assert, but by virtue of what they leave their audiences to infer. The present text need not, therefore, be taken to restrict mimêsis to sections of direct enactment or oratio recta. Nevertheless, we can observe a special connection between those sections and what is distinctive about Aristotle’s conception of mimêsis. Enacted drama and oratio recta in epic afford the clearest cases of mimetic utterance, because it is there that the authors’ detachment from the content of their works is most obvious. They need not be identified with their characters’ words, nor taken to endorse anything they say. Thus enacted drama and oratio recta exemplify authorial detachment in its purest form. They provide a standard of disengaged utterance to which all works of art should aspire. We have here, in embryo, a conception of representation in which literary artists are completely detached from all utterances in their works. The work speaks entirely for itself, with no direct statement or comment from its author (cf. Halliwell [3.17], 173–4). On such a view, to condemn artists, as Plato did, for failing to attain truth, is to misrepresent the very nature of their enterprise. Mimetic pleasure We can now return to our earlier difficulty regarding the pleasure taken in representational objects. Aristotle had said (48b17–19) that if we should not have seen the original of such an object before, it will not give pleasure as a representation, but only through such features as its workmanship or colour. We need to ask what analogue exists in tragedy or epic to satisfy this requirement. For, clearly, it is Aristotle’s view that we do enjoy those genres as representations, and not merely for their workmanship or colour. Yet in what sense must we have ‘previously seen’ what they represent? In order to enjoy, say, Oedipus Rex as a representation, what must the audience have ‘seen before’? Not, of course, the legendary Oedipus himself, whom no audience in historic times could be supposed to have seen. Nor could Aristotle have made it a requirement of enjoying Sophocles’ play that one must have prior knowledge of the Oedipus story. For although most tragedies in his day used traditional stories for their plots, he expressly notes that they could give pleasure to everyone, even though the stories were ‘familiar only to few’ (51b25–6). He also notes that newly invented plots, whose stories were known to no one, could still give pleasure (51b21–3). Obviously, neither the characters nor the story of a wholly invented plot could be regarded as needing to be ‘seen before’ as a condition for enjoyment of the work. Yet one phrase of Aristotle’s suggests a sense in which the pleasure given by tragedy or epic requires prior acquaintance with its subject-matter, even when its characters are unknown or wholly invented. He calls tragedy a representation ‘not of human beings but of actions and of life’ (50a16–18, cf. 50b24–5, 52a1–2). The individual human beings may be quite unknown to us, and so may their particular stories. But what is already known to us is ‘life’, connected here as in the Nicomachean Ethics (1098a18–20, 1100a4–9) with human actions or fortunes over a period of time or an entire career. Sophocles’ tragedy represents ‘the changes and chances of this mortal life’, no less familiar to ancient audiences than to modern ones. Life’s dynamics, its changes from prosperity to adversity, its complex interplay of character with circumstance, its ambiguities and uncertainties, its moral dilemmas and mental conflicts, its ironies and contradictions, its surprises and coincidences, are already familiar to us, and their highlighting in fictional representation is a source of pleasure. We enjoy the tragedy of Oedipus because we can recognize in his story misconceptions, misfortunes, failings and follies, and a grim inevitability, that are typical of human life. Our pity and fear are evoked through our recognition of human frailty embodied in the story. Human vulnerability, and therefore our own, are powerfully brought home to us. The enjoyment with which we respond to all this is what Aristotle calls the pleasure that is ‘proper’ to tragedy (53b10–11, cf. 53a35–6, 59a21, 62b13–14). This pleasure is neither limited to nor dependent upon theatrical enactment. It can be gained no less from reading or hearing a fictional narrative than from seeing a play performed (50b18–20, 53b3–7, 62a12, a17–18). Literary and theatrical values need not coincide, and they may, for Aristotle, even conflict (51a6–11). The pleasure ‘proper’ to tragedy does not require live performance because it depends crucially upon inferences from the content and structure of the plot. Even when a tragedy is performed, the pleasure proper to it cannot be fully experienced while the performance is still in progress, but can be gained only through a retrospect upon the completed action (cf. 53a30–9). That is why Aristotle can treat metrical language, choral odes, and visual elements as mere adornments of tragedy, as ‘seasonings’ (49b25–9, 50b16) rather the main dish. The pleasure that they give is not integral to tragedy’s distinctive function as a mimêsis of action. What he says of ‘spectacle’ is especially revealing. He rates it as the element ‘least integral to the poetic art’ (50b17), as ‘belonging more to the sphere of the property man than of the poet’ (50b20). He dismisses as ‘quite outside the sphere of tragedy’ (53b10) those poets who relied on lavish staging to achieve sensational effects. For the pleasure proper to tragedy is not morbid. It depends not upon the horror that can be produced by terrifying stage-effects, nor upon the thrill caused by pain or cruelty, but upon the compassion we feel for fictional characters who are caught up in the events of a pitiful tale. We respond to an emotional content inherent in the play (53b13–14) rather than to the gimmickry of production. Tragic katharsis The emotional content of tragedy brings us, finally, to the much vexed question of tragic katharsis. Aristotle’s formal definition of tragedy runs as follows: Tragedy is a representation of an action which is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude—in language which is garnished in various forms in its different parts—in the mode of dramatic enactment, not narrative—and by means of pity and fear effecting the katharsis of such emotions. (49b24–8, trans. after Halliwell) The concluding clause has generally been held to contain an ‘answer’ to Plato’s condemnation of poetry for its harmful effect upon control of the emotions. But what was that answer? What did Aristotle mean by the tantalizing term katharsis? We must first notice, and put aside, the modern use of ‘catharsis’ to mean the release of pent-up emotion. That is psychiatric jargon, which derives from an influential way of reading the present text, as a glance at the Concise Oxford Dictionary (s.v. ‘catharsis’) will confirm. If we insist upon reading that use back into Aristotle, we risk prejudging his meaning, even when we retain his own word. Basically, katharsis meant ‘cleansing’, frequently, though not solely, through medical purging or religious purification. Neither of those metaphors, however, enables a satisfactory account to be given of katharsis in the context of tragedy. First ‘purgation’. A purging of pity and fear has sometimes been taken to mean their complete elimination from our emotional system. Against that, it has been rightly objected that, according to Aristotle’s own ethical teaching, the proper feeling of those and other emotions plays an indispensable part in human well-being. It has seemed inconceivable that he should defend tragedy on the ground that it eliminates the emotions altogether. On the other hand, if ‘purging’ the emotions simply means venting them in the theatre, for example by having a good cry, the katharsis clause seems a cumbersome way of expressing that idea. For it seems, absurdly, to represent pity and fear as a means to their own discharge. Collingwood ([3. 36], 51) glosses katharsis as an ‘emotional defecation’, which ‘leaves the audience’s mind, after the tragedy is over, not loaded with pity and fear but lightened of them’. Against this, one must protest that to interpret katharsis as ‘emotional defecation’ saddles Aristotle with a view of the emotions which he simply did not hold. Moreover, merely to reiterate the fact, well known to Plato himself and heavily underscored by him, that audiences gain a pleasurable sense of relief by discharging feelings of pity and fear, would do nothing to counter his argument that such discharges are psychologically harmful. ‘Purification’ of the emotions is equally problematic. In the Nicomachean Ethics (1105b19–25) Aristotle distinguishes between occurrent states of emotional arousal (pathê) and our natural capacities (dunameis) for feeling such states. Clearly, the former could not be purified, for to speak of ‘purifying’ a twinge of pity or a fit of terror is nonsense. ‘Purifying’ might possibly be a metaphor for improving our capacity to feel pity or fear, if tragedy could somehow cause us to feel them more appropriately than certain people do. Yet, although Aristotle has sometimes been credited with a therapeutic theory of that sort (cf. House [3.38], 108–11), it has never been made clear just how tragedy produces such an effect, or indeed why that should be necessary for an audience of ordinary sensibility and sound mind. One might even wonder whether tragedy could affect an audience at all unless its emotional apparatus were already more or less in order. Anyone who does not feel special revulsion, for example, at child-murder, matricide or incest, will hardly be moved, let alone improved, by watching Medea, Electra or Oedipus Rex. Some scholars have therefore tried another tack. Katharsis is not the only word whose meaning is in doubt. The phrase usually rendered ‘of such emotions’ (toioutôn pathêmatôn) could also be translated ‘of such afflictions’. The clause would then mean, ‘accomplishing by means of pity and fear the katharsis of pitiful and fearful afflictions’. That would make good sense, if katharsis could be taken to mean, as several scholars have recently urged (for example Golden [3.50], 145–7; Nussbaum [3.39], 388– 91, 502–3, nn.17–18), ‘clarification’. On that construal, Aristotle would be saying that tragedy, through pity and fear represented in the play, achieves a clarification of just such afflictions in real life. Tragedy enlightens its audience by deepening their understanding of just such sorrows as are typified by the play. For it traces those sorrows to various kinds of psychological conflict which are ‘clarified’ by its action. Such an interpretation is attractive. Linguistically, it fits perfectly. It allows us to connect katharsis with Aristotle’s remarks about ‘learning’ from mimetic works, and about the generalizing power of fiction. It also makes a claim about tragedy that can be amply supported from the experience of actual plays. It founders, however, upon two reefs. First, it tends to beg the question against Plato’s attack. Tragedy’s power to move us is a familiar and incontestable fact. To defend it as serving a purely intellectual purpose, on the basis of a formal definition, is simply to ignore that impact which it is known to have, and for which Plato had condemned it. Secondly, an intellectualist interpretation disregards a passage in the Politics, which—baffling though it is—cannot lightly be set aside. Aristotle there speaks (1341b32–42a16) of a katharsis induced in certain mentally disordered people by exposure to ‘kathartic melodies’ (ta melê ta kathartika). He mentions a pleasurable ‘lightening’ effect produced by orgiastic music, alleviating their frenzied state. In a medical context (Problemata 955a25–6) the term ‘lightening’ (kouphizesthai) is used of the relief felt after coitus by people who suffer from excessive sexual desire. If the katharsis of the Politics has any bearing upon that of the Poetics, to which it expressly refers (1341b39–40), it seems unlikely that the latter should be understood as a purely cognitive experience. Tragic katharsis is unlikely, then, to mean ‘clarification’, but probably included a component of ‘lightening’ or relief. But if so, what was that component, and how was Plato ‘answered’ by making reference to it? The katharsis clause can be interpreted as a pointed and effective response to Plato if we notice (following Sparshott [3.54], 22–3) that it contains a Platonic allusion which Aristotle’s audience would readily have picked up, and which would account for the sudden introduction of the term katharsis without explanation. In the Phaedo Socrates had exalted the true philosopher as one whose soul is cleansed by achieving freedom from bodily appetites and passions. He speaks (69b–c) of the philosopher’s virtues as ‘a kind of katharsis from all such things [sc. pleasures, fears and all else of that sort]’ (6901) and of wisdom herself as ‘a kind of purifying rite’ (katharmos tis). Plato here describes neither a purging nor a purifying of the emotions, but a liberation of the soul from them (reading the Greek genitive as ‘separative’), in which the philosopher achieves the serenity, and especially the immunity from fear of death, so conspicuously shown by Socrates himself. It is not the emotions which are purified or purged, but the soul which is cleansed from servitude to them through release from its bondage to the body. In Aristotle’s reference to the ‘katharsis from such emotions’, which echoes Plato’s wording at 6901 almost exactly, we can still catch an allusion to that very katharsis which Plato had extolled. Paradoxically, it is by means of the emotions aroused in tragedy that that state of tranquillity is achieved. Pity and fear, enacted by the performers and aroused in the audience, so far from causing surrender to such feelings, are the very means by which we may be delivered from their power. The emotional harrowing of tragedy enables us to accept our own frailties as the common lot of mankind, and thereby raises us above a self-absorbed pity, fear or grief. Tragedy has this mysterious, uplifting power. Through compassion and admiration for its victims, we are somehow elevated above our own selfish turmoil. This response is evoked especially when we behold exemplary magnanimity or dignity in face of undeserved suffering. George Orwell once remarked that’ [a] tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him’ (Collected Essays, vol.4, 338). That sentiment is profoundly Aristotelian (cf. 53a4–17), and it could be illustrated by any number of tragedies, ancient or modern. An immortal illustration, however, lay at Aristotle’s elbow, as it still lies at ours. In the Phaedo Socrates had shown miraculous nobility in face of monstrous injustice and a universal human terror. Though not a tragedy by all of Aristotle’s formal criteria, its impact exemplifies the very katharsis which it stresses itself, and it has made just such an impact upon its readers across the centuries. Aristotle responds to Plato, then, by claiming for tragedy precisely that effect which Plato had extolled and achieved in the most moving of his own dialogues. Poetic fiction, rightly understood, can provide just that benefit which Plato had claimed for philosophy. Thus, as Aristotle says, ‘poetry is both more philosophical and more serious than history’ (51b5–6): ‘more philosophical’, because it implicitly suggests ‘universals’ which are the domain of philosophy; and ‘more serious’, not because it is more edifying than history, or shows virtue as any more triumphant, but because it celebrates the power of the human spirit to rise above injustice, misfortune, suffering and death. On that interpretation, it is mistaken to ask whether katharsis is intellectual or emotional, cognitive or affective. For the response just outlined evidently has both intellectual and affective elements. Feeling and thought are interactive. The more thoroughly we understand a tragedy, the more deeply it will engage our emotions. Conversely, the more deeply we are moved by a play, the more we shall be disposed to seek meaning in it. Emotional impact and the quest for understanding are mutually reinforcing. Precisely in that sense katharsis is achieved ‘through pity and fear’. Those feelings are not a means to their own discharge or improvement. Rather, their arousal through a poetic mimêsis is a means to spiritual peace. On the view defended above, katharsis is the attainment of a calm or tranquil frame of mind, an outlook that is ‘philosophical’ in a popular sense of the word also traceable, ultimately, to the Phaedo. It is paradoxical (and Aristotle’s wording in the katharsis clause reflects this), that emotional arousal should be a means to emotional serenity. But the paradox needs no sophisticated medical theory of ‘homoeopathic cures’ to ground it. It is simply common experience, not only of tragedy but of other high art forms, that they can move us profoundly, yet thereby leave us more at peace with ourselves and with the world we inhabit. That experience lies at the core of Aristotle’s aesthetic; and his single reference to it deserves attention, not as mere ad hominem polemic in an ephemeral debate with Plato, but because it points towards a wider account of art which holds perennial truth. PHILOSOPHY OF MIND Aristotle’s chief contributions to the philosophy of mind are to be found in De Anima (DA), a general preface to his lectures on zoology, and in a collection of essays now known as the Parva, Naturalia (PN). Also relevant are a short work on animal movement, De Motu Animalium, and the zoological treatises, De Partibus Animalium and De Generatione Animalium. The account that follows will be based mainly upon De Anima and the Parva Naturalia.³ De Anima has come down to us in three books. The first contains a survey of problems about the ‘soul’ and a critique of previous theorists. The second begins with Aristotle’s own general account of the soul. Its remainder, together with the whole of the third book, deal with the various powers possessed by living things. The order of discussion corresponds, albeit very roughly (cf. Hutchinson [3.62]), with the hierarchy of powers in plants, animals and human beings, ascending from the powers of nutrition and reproduction shared by all organisms to those possessed only by animals (perception and imagination), and then to the power of intellect, which is possessed (within the natural order) by mankind alone. Animal desire and locomotion are also discussed. The essays of the Parva, Naturalia form a series of appendices to De Anima covering a variety of special subjects in psycho-biology. Those of greatest mterest for present-day philosophy of mind are the first five in the series, which deal with sense-perception, memory, sleep, dreams, and divination through sleep. The expression ‘philosophy of mind’ does not, however, map neatly on to either De Anima or the Parva Naturalia. On the one hand, they include empirical psychology and physiology as well as philosophy. On the other hand, many questions now central to the philosophy of mind find no place in them at all. If we ask of them, for example, how mental events are related to physical ones, or how we can know the existence and contents of minds other than our own, we shall ask in vain. Such questions are, in effect, by-passed in Aristotle’s approach to the whole subject. The difficulty in aligning De Anima with ‘philosophy of mind’ is connected with the problem of translating its title term, psuchê. ‘Soul’, though it will generally be used below, has religious associations which are alien to Aristotle’s scientific interests. Although he sharply criticizes earlier scientists, he shares their concern to explain the powers of growth and selfmovement which distinguish living from non-living things, and the perceptual, emotional and cognitive powers which distinguish animals from plants. At the outset (DA 402a7–8) he characterizes psuchê as ‘the principle of animal life’. He expressly warns against limiting the inquiry to human beings (DA 402b3–9), and subsequently attributes psuchê to all living things. Since we do not credit plants, or even animals, with souls, there are many places where ‘soul’ as a translation of psuchê will sound unnatural. Traditionally, the psuchê had been thought of as a shadowy simulacrum of the living body, which can survive its death, and persist in a disembodied state in Hades. It foreshadowed the concept of a ghost, an entity whose post mortem existence is of its very essence (as remains true of ‘soul’ in English). Aristotle, in effect, undermined this tradition by linking the concept of psuchê with that of organic life, and by considering, more closely than his predecessors had done, the implications of that linkage. Thus, he transformed what had been a partly religious concept into a wholly scientific one. Against that background, the question whether the psuchê, or any aspects of it, can exist separately from the body naturally played a larger part in his debate with earlier thinkers than it has played in more recent philosophy of mind. Equally dubious, as a translation of psuchê, is the English ‘mind’. In its ordinary use, as roughly equivalent to the human intellect, it is too narrow for the range of powers associated by Aristotle with psuchê, since it does not include nutrition, growth or reproduction, and is not generally attributed to animals. As for its extended use by philosophers since Descartes, to mean the subject of conscious awareness or thought, although Aristotle may be said to have possessed the idea of such a subject, he explicitly resists its identification with the psuchê. In a f amous passage, to which we shall return, he observes: to say that it is the psuchê that is angry is as if one were to say that it is the psuchê that weaves or builds. It is surely better not to say that the psuchê pities or learns or thinks, but rather that the human being does this with the psuchê. (DA 408b11–15) One further aspect of psuchê needs to be dissociated from De Anima and the Parva Naturalia. Aristotle is unconcerned in these treatises with the ‘true self’, that precious element in human beings whose well-being had been a matter of paramount concern for Socrates and Plato. Even in his ethical writings, talk of psuchê is different in tone from Plato’s. Although he defines human well-being in terms of ‘activity of psuchê’ (Nicomachean Ethics 1098a16), he tends not to speak of ‘souls’ (psuchai) as entities either possessed by or identified with individual human subjects. In his mature psychology the individual soul as a subject of moral attributes, or as a moral agent, receives no attention. This important difference stems largely from Aristotle’s rejection of Platonic dualism, the notion that the soul is an independent substance, lodged within the body during life, yet capable of separate existence. Although Aristotle had embraced that idea in his youth, the treatises of his maturity present a strikingly different picture. That picture is drawn, in broadest outline, in the first three chapters of De Anima II, to which we may now turn. Soul and body Aristotle’s central thesis is that the soul of a living thing is related to its body as ‘form’ (morphê) is related to matter (hulê). The soul is the structure whereby bodily matter is so ordered as to form a living animal or plant. Soul and body are not two separate entities, somehow temporarily conjoined. Rather, they are, like form and matter in general, complementary aspects of a single entity, the whole complex living creature. This thesis is sometimes called ‘hylemorphism’. The ‘form’ of a living thing is attained when the potential of its constituent matter becomes actualized in a full-grown member of its species. In attaining that form, a creature develops certain powers, whose exercise is necessary for its preservation and well-being, and for the perpetuation of its species. Most of these powers are exercised by means of ‘organs’, parts of the body conceived as tools fashioned for specific tasks. Indeed, the very word organon means a tool or implement. Tools and bodily organs both provide Aristotle with models to illustrate his account of the soul. An axe is not just wood and iron, but wood and iron so structured as to be an implement for chopping. Its chopping purpose dictates both its form and its matter, and is essential for grasping its essential nature, ‘what it is to be an axe’ (DA 412b10–15). Aristotle distinguishes, moreover, between its ‘first actuality’, attained when the wood and iron have been fashioned into an implement with power to chop, and its ‘second actuality’, attained when it is being used for chopping. The axe’s essential nature is given by the ‘first’ actuality rather than the ‘second’. For it does not cease to be an axe when the woodsman lays it aside, but only when it becomes so blunted or otherwise damaged that its chopping power has been lost. Similarly, an eye is not just a lump of translucent jelly, but gelatinous material so structured and situated within the body that its owner possesses the power of sight. Should that power be destroyed, the jelly will remain an ‘eye’ in name only (DA 412b18–22). The connection between the eye and sight is not, indeed, a merely contingent one. We cannot see with anything except our eyes, nor can we use our eyes for any purpose except seeing. It is sight which defines the eye; and it does so in terms of the ‘first’ actuality rather than the ‘second’. For the organ does not cease to be an eye at times when its owner is not seeing anything, for example while asleep or in the dark. What is necessary for its being an eye is simply that under appropriate conditions its owner be capable of seeing with it. We can now understand the phrases in which Aristotle formally defines the soul. He calls it ‘the first actuality of a natural body which potentially has life’ (DA 412a27–8), and immediately explicates this as ‘the first actuality of a natural body possessing organs’ (DA 412b5–6). As sight stands to the eye-jelly, so does the complete set of powers possessed by an organism stand to its body as a whole. To ascribe soul to it, then, amounts to saying that it is a body in working order. To credit X with soul, it is not necessary that X should now be absorbing food, reproducing itself, walking, seeing, imagining, remembering, feeling angry, thinking or talking. It is only necessary that it should possess the capacity for whichever of those activities are characteristic of its species. From this account it follows at once that soul can no more exist separately from body than an axe’s chopping power or an eye’s power of sight can exist when the axe or the eye has been destroyed. It is a gross conceptual error to regard an animal’s soul as some sort of receptor or motor within its body, whether a material one, as certain pre-Socratic thinkers had supposed, or an immaterial one, as Plato’s Socrates had affirmed in the Phaedo. It is, in terms made famous by Gilbert Ryle, a ‘category mistake’ to view the soul as a substance in its own right, rather than a set of powers which living things possess. For any given animal or plant species, its ‘soul’ cannot be understood without reference to the bodily apparatus needed to exercise the powers in question: ‘it is not a body, but is something relative to a body. That is why it is in a body, and in a body of some definite kind’ (DA 414a20–2, trans. after revised Oxford translation). This idea is anticipated in a sharp criticism of theories of transmigration. Such theories, Aristotle drily observes, are akin to saying that the art of carpentry could enter into flutes: ‘just as a skill must use its own tools, so a soul has to use its own body’ (DA 407b25–6). Carpentry uses, amongst other tools, saws. To cut timber, a saw must have teeth. Since a flute lacks teeth, its use for sawing is not even imaginable. It is therefore absurd to suggest that carpentry could be practised with tools designed to serve the ends of a quite different skill. If an animal’s soul is a certain set of capacities, then it can only belong to a body equipped to exercise those capacities. Just as the idea of a flute’s being used for carpentry is (not just false but) absurd, so it is absurd to suppose, with Plato’s Socrates, that the body of a donkey might house the soul of a human being, or that the soul of a bee might enter a human body (Phaedo 82a–b). For the body of a donkey does not equip it to weave a cloak or build a house; no more does a human body enable its owner to pollinate flowers or to produce honey. As we saw earlier, Aristotle prefers to say that ‘the human being does things with the soul’, instead of ascribing those activities to the soul itself (DA 408b13–15). He compares saying that the soul is angry with saying that the soul weaves or builds. Here too he is combating the idea of the soul as a separable inner agent which can have experiences or perform actions independently of the body. Since bodily movements play an essential part in weaving or building, the absurdity of attributing those tasks to the soul alone is clear. Similarly, Aristotle argues, to attribute anger, pity or other mental phenomena to the soul alone is to disregard the bodily apparatus through which the relevant capacities must be displayed. To say that a person does things ‘with the soul’ is to say that certain capacities are exercised through the appropriate physical apparatus. In a similar vein, Aristotle distinguishes a physiologist’s account of anger, ‘a boiling of the blood and hot stuff around the heart’, from a philosopher’s definition of it, ‘a desire for retaliation’ (DA 403a29–b1). The latter account gives the ‘form’ of anger, the former provides the ‘matter’ in which it has to be realized. Aristotle also suggests that the true student of nature will combine both sorts of account. The physiology of the emotions plays an essential part in a full understanding of them. Anger is not a pure state of feeling, but is inseparable from the bodily responses in which it is vented. Yet it cannot be simply equated with those responses. The bodily arousal typical of a given emotion may be present when there is little or no occasion for that emotion to be felt (cf. DA 403a19–24). To identify an emotional state specifically as one of anger, we do not take a man’s pulse or measure his blood-pressure. Rather, we interpret his bodily reactions and behaviour as part of a pattern, a wider context within which anger is typically provoked and displayed, and in the light of which it has to be understood. Modern philosophy has pressed further the question of how mental events or states are related to bodily reactions or behaviour. It is assumed that there are radically distinct sorts of item: private experiences on the one hand and observable processes on the other. But from Aristotle’s perspective that distinction is entirely problematic. Anger, understood as the urge to retaliate, can occur only in animals that respond to attack or injury with certain bodily reactions or overt behaviour. If we insist upon asking how their urge to retaliate is related to their physical response, Aristotle would reply that ‘one need not inquire whether the soul and the body are one, any more than whether the wax and its shape are one’ (DA 412b6–7), Just as the wax and the impress made in it by a seal are inseparable aspects of a single waxen object, so a certain bodily response and the urge to strike back are inseparable aspects of the single phenomenon that we call anger. A purely chemical or neurological description of anger, however minute its detail, if it makes no reference to the kinds of stimulus that typically provoke anger, the goals sought by an angry animal, and the role of anger in an animal’s preservation and well-being, will miss what is of primary significance in the whole phenomenon. Basic to Aristotle’s account of the soul, then, are the tasks that a creature can perform with its body. To speak of its soul is to refer, compendiously, to the set of powers possessed by creatures of its type. In the higher animals, and especially in mankind, these powers are both numerous and complex, and a full account of them will vary widely from one species to another. This theory, as Aristotle observes (DA 414b20–8), is too general to provide information for any specific form of life. In his zoological writings, however, it is applied fruitfully to a huge variety of animal species. It is there shown in marvellous detail why different species develop the organs they have, and how those organs are fitted for the tasks they must perform if they are to contribute to the survival and well-being of the whole animal. In De Anima, by contrast, we find only a broad survey of the various powers possessed at each level of life. These must now be considered in turn. Nutrition and reproduction The powers of growth, nourishment and reproduction are attributed by Aristotle to the ‘nutritive’ soul. Because they are shared by all living things, ‘living’ is defined with reference to them alone (DA 415a23–5). So long as they remain operative, an animal or human being may be said to ‘live’, even should its higher faculties be impaired. Aristotle calls the intake of food and reproduction the ‘most natural of functions for living things’ (DA 415a26–7). For it is through them that living things achieve the only sort of permanence available to them. Although they must perish individually, they are enabled, through the generation of offspring like themselves, to perpetuate their species. Thus ‘they share in the eternal and the divine in the only way that they can’ (DA 415a29–b1). This recalls the teaching of Diotima in Plato’s Symposium (207a–208b): the reproductive urge in all animals is an aspiration to immortality, in which mortal creatures unconsciously emulate the divine. The capacities of the ‘nutritive’ soul will strike most philosophers of mind as falling outside their province. Since growth, nourishment and reproduction are not ‘mental’ processes, they seem to raise no ‘mind-body problem’. No philosopher now asks, for example, how mind and body are related in the digestion of food, since we normally remain unconscious of that purely ‘physical’ process. Only with indigestion can the philosopher of mind get a foothold, by asking how dyspepsia is related to the sensation of heartburn. But nothing could illustrate better the shift that has occurred in the locus of philosophical concern. Ever since Descartes, the central issues for the philosophy of mind have arisen only with respect to sentient creatures. Because growth and nutrition can occur in non-sentient substances, those processes fail to qualify, as it were, for ‘mental’ status. Aristotle’s map, however, is differently drawn. The question of how psuchê is related to the body arises for any sort of living thing, whether sentient or not. For plants as for animals, we may distinguish form from matter, actuality from potentiality. Plants may be seen as conforming, no less than animals, to Aristotle’s definition of the soul as ‘the first actuality of a natural body possessing organs’. Their parts can be viewed as rudimentary organs with specific jobs to perform: ‘for example the leaf serves to shelter the pod, and the pod to shelter the fruit; the roots are analogous to the mouth, since both take in food’ (DA 412b1–4). In the case of plants, we cannot, of course, ask how sensations, feelings or thoughts are related to their physical make-up. But we may well ask how their capacities for nourishment and reproduction are related to their material constituents. And we may take a set of chemical processes in a plant (for example the absorption of heat and moisture through its roots) to constitute the material basis for realization of its form. It is only when those processes are explained as the intake of nourishment and a means to growth, that we have understood their significance in the plant’s life. Perception Animals are distinguished from plants by their powers of perception. These powers enable them to move about, seek food, adapt to their environment and defend themselves, and thus to survive and flourish (cf. DA 434a30– b8; PN 436b8–437a3). The minimal power, found even in the simplest animals, is the sense of touch. But most species possess a more complex apparatus, in which several different sensory powers are somehow combined in a single, unified system. How are these powers related to one another and to the bodily organs through which they are exercised? And how, in detail, does Aristotle understand what happens in perception? In this connection, he repeatedly uses phrases which need a word of explanation. He will speak of certain items as ‘inseparable, yet separate in account’, or as being ‘the same yet different in their being’. By this he means that a single thing can answer to two or more different descriptions. A lump of sugar, for example, is both white and sweet. ‘The white thing’ is identical with, or inseparable from, ‘the sweet thing’. Yet its ‘being white’ is different from its ‘being sweet’: we would give distinct accounts of what it is to be white and what it is to be sweet. The two descriptions have, as we should say, different senses but the same reference. The relation of the morning star to the evening star is a familiar modern example. This point plays an important part in Aristotle’s view of the relation of the senses to one another and to an animal’s other powers. He will often say of two or more powers that they are ‘the same, yet differ in their being’ (for example DA 413b29–32, 424a26, 427a2–3, 432a31–b4, 432a31–b3, 433b21–5; PN 449a14–20, 459a15–17). For he wishes to insist both upon their inseparability, as belonging to a single, unified system, and upon the need for distinct accounts of their respective operations. He regards the sense-organs as different parts of a single, connected apparatus centred in the heart. Perception can occur only when the impulses initiated by an external object’s impact upon the organs have travelled to the central sensorium. This centre, and the apparatus which it controls, will be differently described for each of the various functions it enables its owner to perform.⁴ In his essay on sleep (PN 455a20–2), Aristotle writes: ‘For there exists a single sense-faculty, and the master sense-organ is single, though its being differs for the perception of each kind of thing, for example of sound or colour.’ Similarly, in his treatise on sense-perception (PN 449a16–20) he argues that there must be a single sense-faculty, yet each of the modes in which it operates (visual, auditory, etc.) is different. A single apparatus is capable of receiving data from a variety of external stimuli through several different types of receptor. Hence different accounts of what it is (the ‘being’ of this apparatus) will be required for each mode of its operation. Why must there be a single central sensorium upon which all the senseorgans converge? Because, Aristotle argues, it is one and the same subject that sees, hears, imagines, desires, thinks, moves and acts. All of these powers alike can be exercised by a single animal when it is awake, and all alike are cut off when it is asleep. Our ascription of perception, desire and movement to a single creature requires that it be possessed of a single central apparatus, where all input from the sense-organs is registered, and from which all its responses originate. We might think of the central sensorium as analogous to a multipurpose tool, a single thing, yet also as many different things (for example knife, corkscrew, screwdriver) as the functions which it enables its owner to perform. A full understanding of ‘what it is’, of its ‘being’, calls for a differentiated account of its role in each of those tasks. But it remains a single ‘master’ organ, whose functioning is essential for every part of the creature’s sensory apparatus, and much else within it, to work. Aristotle calls it the ‘primary sense-organ’. Although he himself identified it with the heart, in modern physiology it finds a close analogue in the brain. Since the sensory apparatus is centred at the heart, it is understandable that Aristotle should sometimes speak as if the soul were in the heart. Thus, he can speak of conscious awareness (for example being angry or frightened) as due to movements or changes within the heart (DA 408b5– 11). But such language should not be taken to mean that consciousness resides in some spatial region of the heart. The power of sight is ‘in’ the eye, but unlike the eye it has no spatial extension (DA 424a24–8). It is not ‘in’ the eye in the sense in which the pupil is in it. Similarly, to assign the soul to the heart is not to locate consciousness there, but is simply to say that an animal’s perceptual (and other) powers can function only if certain physical processes occur in the central organ. Aristotle’s hypothesis of a single centre controlling all sensory (and other) functions of higher animals is intelligible in broad outline. But much detail in his account of perception remains obscure. We have spoken of input from the sense-organs as ‘registered’ in the central sensorium, and of the animal’s ‘responses’. What exactly is the nature of this ‘registering’ or of these ‘responses’? Aristotle’s answer is elusive and controversial. He says that the power of perception is ‘the capacity to receive the sensible forms without the matter’ (424a17–19, 425b23–4). But how is that to be understood? Perception obviously differs from nutrition in that the matter of perceived objects is not absorbed into the percipient’s body. A piece of bread must be ingested if it is to nourish, but not if it is merely seen, touched, smelt or tasted. But in what sense can an object’s ‘sensible form’ be received without its matter? Is it meant that when we see a red flag, for example, the eye-jelly takes on its properties, literally reflecting the flag’s redness? Or does ‘receiving the form’ refer to a change in the percipient’s consciousness, the visual awareness of red? Or does it refer to both of these, regarded as two different aspects of a single event? Aristotle compares what happens in perception with the impress received by wax from a bronze or golden seal: the shape of the seal is reproduced in the wax, whereas the bronze or gold is not (424a19–21). When someone sees a red flag, its matter is not absorbed into the percipient’s body, yet its redness is somehow transmitted to the observer. Aristotle supposes that a continuous series of impulses is relayed from the flag to the eyes, and thence to the heart. These impulses must preserve (in some fashion which is not made clear) the structure of the flag’s sensible properties, yet without importing into the percipient any of the matter of the flag itself. This account has been well compared with the modern idea of signals emitted from physical objects, and relaying their sensible properties in coded ‘messages’ via the sense-organs and nervous system to the observer’s brain (Ackrill [3.29], 67). Aristotle probably does not mean that the eye-jelly is literally reddened. For he says only that the seeing organ is coloured ‘after a fashion’ (DA 425b22–3). It could, however, receive a structure which represents the flag’s red colour, without itself turning red. Such a structure would suffice to explain, as Aristotle says, why, for example, after-images can persist in the sense-organs when the external stimuli have gone (DA 425b24–5; cf. PN 459b5–18). Aristotle’s use of the waxen imprint as a model for what occurs in perception recalls his caution, quoted earlier, that ‘we need no more inquire whether the soul and the body are one than whether the wax and its shape are one’ (DA 412b6–7). Perceiving should not be described either in purely physiological terms or in purely psychological ones; and a description of the latter type, which gives the ‘form’, is not reducible to one which gives the ‘matter’. If that interpretation is correct, it will follow that for perception, as for the analogous case of anger, both sorts of story need to be told for a complete account. And, as in the case of anger, it needs to be shown how perceptual powers are conducive to the subject’s preservation and overall well-being. Beyond this, as we have seen, Aristotle recognizes no ‘mind-body’ problems of the kind that have dominated modern philosophy of mind. Imagination and related powers Aristotle next turns to imagination (phantasia), a power of great importance in human beings and in the higher animals. His main account of it is given in De Anima III. 3, but it also plays a major role in the essays on memory, sleep and dreams in the Parva Naturalia, and on desire and movement in De Motu Animalium. Aristotle relates imagination to the power of perception in the terms he had used to express the relationship of the different senses to one other and to the primary sense-faculty: they are ‘the same yet differ in their being’ (PN 459a14–16). That is, they share a common physical basis in the sensorium centred at the heart. But since that apparatus works differently in its different roles, a separate account is needed for its ‘imagining’ operations. The story of those operations forms a sequel to Aristotle’s story about ordinary perception, later crystallized in Thomas Hobbes’s phrase ‘decaying sense’. Movements produced by external objects in an animal’s sense-organs will often persist as traces in the organs when the original stimuli are no longer present. These movements are carried from the senseorgans, through the veins, to the heart, where (by a process which remains obscure) they are stored, and may later be reactivated. They are then experienced as mental images, memories or dreams. Imagination thus enables waking animals to visualize or recall objects in their absence, and to be attracted or repelled by them, according as they are envisaged as pleasant or painful. It also collaborates with desire and (in human beings) with thought, to produce movement. An animal’s desire for pleasure and its aversion to pain impels it to pursue objects envisaged as pleasant or beneficial, and to shun those envisaged as painful or harmful. So far the role of imagination is limited to the storage of senseimpressions and their retrieval as mental images. But Aristotle’s account has a further dimension, which reflects the kinship of the word phantasia with ‘appearing’. Modern descendants from the same word-group include ‘fancy’, ‘fantasy’ and ‘phantom’. The word-group covers many kinds of phenomena, including not only ‘appearances’ in ordinary perception but also what ‘appears’ pleasant or good, and is ‘fancied’ as an object of desire. It also covers deceptive appearances (for example optical and other sensory illusions), after-images, dreams, delusions, apparitions and hallucinations. No single English word is wide enough to cover all these ‘appearances’. ‘Imagination’ is an acceptable translation of phantasia where mental imagery is involved. But in several cases mentioned by Aristotle as instances of phantasia, images find no place: the sun ‘appears’ only one foot across (DA 428b3–4; PN 458b28–9, 460b18–20); a single stick held between crossed fingers ‘appears’ as if it were two (PN 460b20–2); to a person gripped by strong emotion, a stranger ‘appears’ as a loved one or an enemy (PN 460b3–11); to feverish patients, cracks in their bedroom walls ‘appear’ as animals (PN 460b11–16); land ‘appears’ to be moving to those who are sailing past it (PN 460b26–7); the likeness of a man or a centaur may be seen in shifting cloud-formations (PN 461b19–21). In such cases phantasia signifies the way an experience registers with, or is interpreted by, the subject. At its broadest, it is the capacity whereby things presented to an observer, in any mode of experience, appear to that subject in the way that they do. It determines what content the objects have for the observer, what they are seen as. We may conveniently label it ‘interpretive phantasia’. Phantasia in this broad sense has received much attention in recent philosophy of mind, and Aristotle shows a powerful insight in calling attention to it. Yet it remains unclear whether he holds any unifying theory linking it with the capacity for forming mental images, or indeed what such a theory would look like. For the latter capacity can be exercised, on Aristotle’s own showing, only in the absence of the original objects whose sensory traces produce images. By contrast, interpretive phantasia must be exercised concurrently with the experience itself: a stick is felt as two only while it is being touched with crossed fingers. On the face of it, imageformation and interpretive phantasia seem quite different. The hypothesis of ‘decaying sense’ has no apparent relevance to the latter, and it is not obvious how both can be explained as operations of a single power. Aristotle rightly distinguishes between imagination and belief or judgment (doxa). The exercise of interpretive phantasia is compatible with widely differing beliefs as to whether things really are the way they appear. A paranoid man may be firmly convinced that a stranger is his enemy, whereas someone who assimilates a cloud to a centaur does not believe for a moment that it is one. Patients may or may not think that the cracks in their walls are animals, depending on the severity of their illness. When we say of an object seen indistinctly, that ‘it appears to be a man’, we register uncertainty as to whether or not it really is one (DA 428a13–15). Judgment, then, may either endorse or oppose the deliverances of imagination, or it may remain non-committal. More dubious are two further distinctions between imagination and judgment (DA 427b16–24). First, we can imagine things at will, whereas we cannot judge them to be the case at will. Secondly, ‘when we judge something terrible or fearful, we straightway feel accordingly’, whereas with imagination we are in the same state as people viewing terrible things in a picture. The first of these points is plausible only with respect to voluntary image-formation; with respect to interpretive phantasia it seems far more debatable. The second distinction seems clearly untenable, at least with respect to some workings of the imagination: bad dreams or memories may be as terrifying as things judged terrible in reality. In comparing the imagining of terrible things with viewing them in a picture, Aristotle does not say, and is unlikely to mean, that we feel no emotion at all (cf. Belfiore [3.35], 243–5). For it would then be hard to explain the power of mimetic objects to stir our emotions, so clearly recognized in the Poetics. But the present text does suggest a distinction, perhaps implicit also at Poetics 53b12, between the full-scale pity or terror aroused by events judged to be real, and the ‘distanced’ feeling of those emotions in response to a representational work of art. Aesthetic experience, however, receives virtually no attention in either De Anima or the Parva Naturalia. Their focus is upon the role of imagination in animal desire and goal-directed movement. Aristotle’s interest, as usual, lies in the faculty’s contribution to animal survival and well-being. This circumscribes his treatment rather narrowly. For the imagination, as we think of it, is not merely the capacity for forming images or interpreting experience. It includes creative or inventive powers, especially those displayed in mimetic works of art. Poetic fictions are preeminent among its products. Aristotle may, indeed, have recognized a connection between phantasia and artistic ability. He identifies aptitude for poetic metaphor with an inborn flair for ‘seeing resemblances’ (Poetics 1459a6–8), a gift which has obvious connections with interpretive phantasia. Yet he nowhere explores the role of that power in artistic creation as a subject in its own right. Intellect No aspect of Aristotle’s thought is more controversial than his treatment of the intellect (nous). Nor is anything in his writings more puzzling or harder to reconcile with his wider philosophical outlook. In general, as we have seen, he treats mental faculties as inseparable from their physical basis. In line with this, we should expect the intellect to be realized in an appropriate kind of matter, and therefore to exist only within a living human body. Aristotle sometimes entertains this view, especially when making thought dependent upon imagination. Thus he writes: ‘But if this too [sc. thinking] is a form of imagination or does not exist apart from imagination, it would not be possible even for this to exist without the body’ (DA 403a8–10). Since the soul is later declared never to think without imagery (DA 431a14–17), and since both practical and theoretical thinking are said to require imagery (DA 431b7–10, 432a8–14), we might infer that the intellect can exist only within a living human being. For thought requires imagination, imagination in turn requires perception, and both the latter powers are inseparable from a properly functioning body. Yet Aristotle remains unwilling to draw that inference. His remarks about intellect are tentative in tone and cryptic in content, but they consistently postulate a special status for it, exempting it from material embodiment, hence from perishing: ‘the intellect seems to be engendered in us as some sort of independent substance and not to be destroyed’ (DA 408b18–19); unlike our capacity for memory or love, which ceases with bodily decay, ‘the intellect is probably something more divine, and is unaffected’ (DA 408b29); ‘it seems to be a distinct kind of soul, and it alone admits of being separated, as the immortal is separable from the perishable’ (DA 413b25–7); and, by contrast with powers requiring bodily activity (such as walking, nutrition, perception), ‘it remains that only intellect enters from outside and only intellect is divine. For its activity is not bodily activity’ (De Generatione Animalium 736b27–9; cf. DA 413a7, 429a22–7). Alone among our mental faculties, then, the intellect is no mere aspect of a formmatter composite, but is pure form without matter. Since it needs no material embodiment, it can exist separately from the body, and is therefore capable of surviving death. It has an equally privileged status in Aristotle’s ethics, where its exercise in philosophical study (theôria) affords the highest happiness and the only immortality possible for mankind (Nicomachean Ethics 1177a11–18, 1177b26–1178a3). Two factors, in particular, mark the intellect as exceptional. First, it requires no bodily organ for its exercise. In thinking we can apprehend all manner of objects, far and near, material and immaterial, sensible and abstract. Objects of thought, unlike those of perception, require no bodily apparatus to be apprehended. They are grasped directly, yet without physicsl contact. Moreover, thought, unlike perception or emotion, is attended by no bodily changes or processes of which we are conscious while we think. Secondly, thinking is not restricted to human subjects, but is also, in Aristotle’s larger scheme of things, a function of immaterial beings, including God, whose sole mode of activity it is. Human thinking is conceived, analogously, as the operation of a divine element within us, a substance in its own right, whereby we can imitate, albeit imperfectly and intermittently, the continuous and eternal thinking of God. In an enigmatic chapter of De Anima. (III.5) Aristotle distinguishes ‘active’ or ‘productive’ intellect from ‘passive’ intellect, and says of the former that ‘in its separate state it alone is just that which it is, and it is this alone which is immortal and eternal’ (430a22–3). The point of this distinction remains obscure, and it may not embody any doctrine that was ever clearly formulated by Aristotle himself. Possibly, he would have distinguished two levels of intellectual activity: (1) a mundane level at which thought requires images, is dependent upon the body, and must therefore perish with it; and (2) a loftier level at which neither images nor their bodily correlates are required, because the objects of thought are purely abstract or formal in nature. If the second level were the domain of the ‘active’ intellect, its capacity for separate existence might be defended (not very cogently), on the ground that imageless thought needs no physical embodiment. Aristotle’s remarks suggest, however, that the active intellect is somehow operative in all human thinking, enabling even the passive intellect to function in its own domain. Without a divine operator at work in us, we could not think at all. Whether the operator is merely god-like or whether, as one tradition of commentary has maintained, it is to be identified with God himself, has been the subject of an age-old and still inconclusive debate (cf. Rist [3.33], 177–82). That debate belongs more to the history of Aristotle’s metaphysics and theology than to his philosophy of mind. One may in fact doubt whether he would ever have arrived at a doctrine of separable intellect had he been concerned with human psychology alone (cf. Wilkes [3.47], 116). The doctrine is so strongly redolent of Platonic dualism that many would happily write it off as an outmoded relic from an early stage of Aristotle’s development. In view of its persistence throughout De Anima, and its appearance in the biological and ethical treatises, it cannot be so easily dismissed. Yet it remains in tension with the generally monistic tenor of Aristotle’s psychology. He may well have been aware of the tension himself. For on this topic, above all, he gives the impression of wrestling with problems rather than presenting cut-and-dried solutions: ‘concerning the intellect and the power of thinking, nothing is clear as yet’ (DA 413b24–5). After more than two millennia, those words remain as true as ever. In conclusion, we may recall Aristotle’s characterization of the plot of tragedy as its ‘soul’ (Poetics 50a38–9). The full significance of that remark should now be apparent. We have seen that the soul of a living thing is the structure which enables a plant or an animal to exercise the powers characteristic of its species. Similarly, the plot of a tragedy is the structured nexus of events which enables the power characteristic of that genre to be exercised. Just as without soul there can be no living thing, so without plot there can be no tragedy. The declared aim of the Poetics is to examine the ‘power’ (dunamis) which each species of poetry possesses (47a8–9). A tragedy or an epic is designed to make a certain impact. Its ‘soul’ is the structure whereby it can move and enlighten its viewers concerning the vicissitudes of human life. A poetic fiction, like other mimetic objects, complements scientific inquiry into human powers, by displaying them at work and by engaging them in the service of self-understanding. According to Aristotle’s ethical teaching, human well-being lies in excellent ‘activity of soul’, i.e. in the best use of those capacities for rational thought and action by which mankind is differentiated. We have seen how those capacities are exercised with pleasure in the experience of poetic fiction, and of other mimetic objects. As representations of human behaviour, those objects depict, and give play to, the very powers which define their makers and their viewers. Through their distinctive appeal to the mind and the senses, they satisfy needs rooted in our nature. Hence the two themes of this chapter are, at bottom, interconnected. Aristotle’s aesthetics complement, as they are also conditioned by, his philosophy of mind. His work in both fields reflects the naturalism which is the dominant strain in his thought, and the scientific outlook which is its hallmark. NOTES 1 All references to the Poetics are to R.Kassel’s text [3.5], with the initial ‘14’ omitted from Bekker page-numbers. References to other Aristotelian treatises are to the relevant Oxford Classical Texts. Translations are my own unless otherwise noted. 2 For a fuller study of them, see Gallop [3.49]. With permission, some material from that study has been used below. 3 References to De Anima and the Parva Naturalia are to W.D.Ross’s texts [3. 12] and [3.14], with titles abbreviated to DA and PN. Translations are my own except where noted. 4 See Gallop [3.8], pp. 124–6. I draw upon this study occasionally below. SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY ORIGINAL LANGUAGE TEXTS AND EDITIONS Aesthetics 3.1 S.H.Butcher, Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, 4th edn, New York 1911; repr. New York 1951. 3.2 I.Bywater, Aristotle on the Art of Poetry, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1909. 3.3 E.M.Cope, The Rhetoric of Aristotle, 3 vols, rev. J.E.Sandys, Cambridge, 1877. 3.4 G.F.Else, Aristotle’s Poetics: The argument, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1957. 3.5 R.Kassel, ed., Aristotelis De Arte Poetica Liber, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1965. 3.6 D.W.Lucas, ed., Aristotle: ‘Poetics’, Greek text, with intro., notes and appendices, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1968. 3.7 W.D.Ross, ed., Aristotelis ‘Ars Rhetorica’, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1959. Philosophy of mind 3.8 D.Gallop, ed., Aristotle on Sleep and Dreams, with trans., intro., notes and glossary, Warminster, Aris and Phillips, 1996. 3.9 W.S.Hett, trans., Aristotle’s ‘De Anima’ and ‘Parva Naturalia’, Loeb Classical Library, London and Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1936. 3.10 R.D.Hicks, ed., Aristotle: ‘De Anima’, with trans., intro. and comm., Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1907. 3.11 M.Nussbaum, ed., Aristotle, De Motu Animalium, with trans., intro., comm. and exegetic essays, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1978. 3.12 W.D.Ross, ed., Aristotelis ‘De Anima’, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1959. 3.13 ——ed., De Anima, with intro. and comm., Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1961. 3.14 ——ed., Parva Naturalia, with intro. and comm., Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1955. 3.15 P.Siwek, ed., Parva Naturalia, with Latin trans. and comm., Rome, 1963. ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS AND EDITIONS Complete works 3.16 J.Barnes, ed., The Complete Works of Aristotle. The Revised Oxford Translation, 2 vols, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1984. Separate works Aesthetics 3.17 S.Halliwell, ed., The Poetics of Aristotle, trans. with intro. and comm., Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1987. 3.18 M.E.Hubbard, trans., Poetics, in D.A.Russell and M.Winterbottom (eds), Ancient Literary Criticism, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1972. 3.19 J.Hutton, ed., Aristotle’s ‘Poetics’, with trans., intro. and notes, New York, W.W.Norton and Co., 1982. 3.20 R.Janko, ed., Aristotle: ‘Poetics’, with trans., intro. and notes, Indianapolis , Hackett, 1987. 3.21 G.A.Kennedy, Aristotle on the Art of Rhetoric: A theory of civic discourse, trans. with intro., notes and appendices, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1991. Philosophy of mind 3.22 K.Foster and S.Humphries, trans., Aristotle’s ‘De Anima’ in the Version of William of Moerbeke and the Commentary of St. Thomas Aquinas, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1951. 3.23 D.W.Hamlyn, ed., Aristotle’s ‘De Anima’, Books II and III (with parts of Book I), with trans., intro. and notes, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1968. 3.24 H.Lawson-Tancred, ed., Aristotle: ‘De Anima’, with trans., intro. and notes, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1986. 3.25 R.Sorabji, ed., Aristotle on Memory, trans. with intro. and notes, London , Duckworth, 1972. ANTHOLOGIES AND BIBLIOGRAPHIES 3.26 J.Barnes et al., eds, Articles on Aristotle, vol. iv, Psychology and Aesthetics, London, Duckworth, 1979. [Bibliography, pp. 187–90.] 3.27 A.O.Rorty, ed., Essays on Aristotle’s ‘Poetics’, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1992. [Bibliography, pp. 425–35.] 3.28 M.C.Nussbaum and A.O.Rorty, eds, Essays on Aristotle’s ‘Philosophy of Mind’, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1992. [Bibliography, pp. 401–19.] See also chs 6 and 9 of [1.39] J.Barnes, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle (1995) with bibliographies at pp. 337–45 and 379–84. Comprehensive Bibliographies are given also in works by E.Belfiore and S.Halliwell listed below ([3.35], 365–80 and [3.37], 357–64). GENERAL STUDIES OF ARISTOTLE’S THOUGHT 3.29 J.L.Ackrill, Aristotle the Philosopher, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1981. [Esp. ch. 5.] 3.30 D.J.Allan, The Philosophy of Aristotle, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1949; 2nd edn 1970. [Esp. ch. 6.] 3.31 J.Barnes, Aristotle, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1982. [Esp. chs 15 and 19.] 3.32 G.E.R.Lloyd, Aristotle: The growth and structure of his thought, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1968. [Esp. chs 9 and 12.] 3.33 J.M.Rist, The Mind of Aristotle: A study in philosophical growth, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1990. [Esp. ch. 9.] 3.34 W.D.Ross, Aristotle, London, Methuen, 1923. [Esp. chs 5 and 9.] OTHER BOOKS Aesthetics 3.35 E.Belfiore, Tragic Pleasures: Aristotle on plot and emotion, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1992. 3.36 R.G.Collingwood, The Philosophy of Art, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1938. [Esp. ch. 3.] 3.37 S.Halliwell, Aristotle’s ‘Poetics’, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1986. 3.38 H.House, Aristotle’s ‘Poetics’: A course of eight lectures, revised with preface by C.Hardie, London, Hart-Davis, 1956. 3.39 M.Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and ethics in Greek tragedy and philosophy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986. [Esp. pp. 378–91.] 3.40 E.Schaper, A Prelude to Aesthetics, London, Allen and Unwin, 1968. [Esp. ch. 3.] Philosophy of mind 3.41 J.I.Beare, Greek Theories of Elementary Cognition, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1906. 3.42 W.W.Fortenbaugh, Aristotle on Emotion, London, Duckworth, 1975. 3.43 W.F.R.Hardie, Aristotle’s Ethical Theory, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2nd edn 1980, chs 5 and 16. 3.44 G.E.R.Lloyd and G.E.L.Owen (eds), Aristotle on Mind and the Senses, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1978. 3.45 D.Modrak, Aristotle: The power of perception, Chicago, 1987. 3.46 F.Nuyens, L’Évolution de la. psychologie d’Aristote, Louvain, 1948 (originally published in Flemish, 1939). 3.47 K.V.Wilkes, Physicalism, Atlantic Highlands, N.J., Humanities Press, 1978. [Esp. ch. 7.] ARTICLES AND CHAPTERS Aesthetics 3.48 J.Bernays, ‘Aristotle on the effect of tragedy’, English trans. J. and J.Barnes from Zwei Abhandlungen über die aristotelische Theorie des Drama (Berlin, 1880; first published Breslau, 1857), in [3.26], 154–65. 3.49 D.Gallop, ‘Animals in the Poetics’, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 8, ed. J.Annas (1990), 145–71. 3.50 L.Golden, ‘Mimêsis and Katharsis’, Classical Philology, lxiv 3 (1969), 145– 53. 3.51 S.Halliwell, ‘Pleasure, Understanding and Emotion in Aristotle’s Poetics’, in [3.27], 241–60. 3.52 R.Janko, ‘From Catharsis to the Aristotelian Mean’, in [3.27], 341–58. 3.53 J.Lear, ‘Katharsis’, Phronesis xxxiii 3 (1988), 297–326, repr. in [3.27], 315– 40. 3.54 F.E.Sparshott, ‘The Riddle of Katkarsis’, in Centre and Labyrinth: Essays in honour of Northrop Frye, ed. E.Cook et al. (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1983), 14–37. 3.55 S.White, ‘Aristotle’s favourite tragedies’, in [3.27], 221–40. Philosophy of mind 3.56 J.L.Ackrill, ‘Aristotle’s definitions of Psuchê’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 73 (1972–73), 119–33, repr. in [3.26], 65–75. 3.57 J.Barnes, ‘Aristotle’s concept of mind’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 72 (1971–72), 101–14, repr. in [3.26], 32–41. 3.58 I.Block, ‘The order of Aristotle’s psychological writings’, American Journal of Philology 82 (1961), 50–77. 3.59 M.F.Burnyeat, ‘Is an Aristotelian philosophy of mind still credible? (a draft)’, in [3.28], 15–26. 3.60 D.Gallop, ‘Aristotle on sleep, dreams, and final causes’, Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy, vol. iv (1988), eds J.J.Cleary and D.C.Shartin (Lanham 1989), 257–90. 3.61 W.F.R.Hardie, ‘Aristotle’s treatment of the relation between soul and body’, Philosophical Quarterly 14 (1964), 53–72. 3.62 D.S.Hutchinson, ‘Restoring the order of Aristotle’s De Anima’, Classical Quarterly 37 (ii) (1987), 373–81. 3.63 C.H.Kahn, ‘Sensation and consciousness in Aristotle’s psychology’, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 48 (1966), 43–81, repr. in [3.26], 1–31. 3.64 M.C.Nussbaum and H.Putnam, ‘Changing Aristotle’s mind’, in [3.28], 27– 56. 3.65 M.Schofield, ‘Aristotle on the imagination’, in [3.44], 99–129, repr. in [3. 26], 103–32. 3.66 R.K.Sorabji, ‘Body and soul in Aristotle’, Philosophy 49 (1974), 63–89, repr. in [3.26], 42–64.