Abstract

In this article, I foreground the physiology of phantasia in Aristotle, which has been comparatively understudied. In the first section, I offer a new interpretation of the relationship between aisthēmata and phantasmata, based on passages in the De Anima and the Parva Naturalia, and for a nuanced understanding of their respective substrates in the body, which I argue to be connate pneuma and blood. In the second section, I draw out the ramifications of this physiological presence of phantasmata in the blood and compare the integration of phantasmata into a person or animal’s experiential history with the process of digestion. Both processes, I contend, require internalization of foreign elements as well as their optimal organization; more strikingly, both processes occur in the same substance, in the same location, and, perhaps, at the same time.