Abstract

Traditional interpretations of Aristotle’s concept of phantasia have not resolved the two difficulties rooted in the aisthesis-phantasia distinction: (1) the paradox between phantasia’s distinction from perception and its close relation to perception; (2) the tension between phantasia as an imaginative power (eidolopoiein) and as a power for sensory appearance (phainemenon), which seems indistinguishable from perception. In this article, I suggest that the aisthesis-phantasia distinction arises from Aristotle’s need to explain the possibility of perceptual error while upholding the reliability of perception. The distinction lies between veridical perception and non-veridical phantasia and presupposes Aristotle’s perceptual realism. This account provides a possible way out of the difficulties at issue, in which phantasia in the sense of fallible experience unifies both imaginative experience and inaccurate perceptions, and phantasia’s both distinction from and association with perception are presented in answer to perceptual unreliability.