Abstract

This paper comments on Rotraud Hansberger’s article, “Representation of which reality? ‘Spiritual forms’ and ‘ma‘ānī’ in the Arabic adaptation of Aristotle’s Parva naturalia.” The article addresses the issue of whether the representation involved in perception and memory, on the one hand, and in dream-visions, on the other, follows, in both cases, the same mechanisms and refers ultimately to the same reality, given that in the first case, we are in the presence of an “ascending” process in which mental representations are derived from a corporeal object of perception, whereas in the second case we have to do with a “descending” process in which they “flow” from the universal intellect. This paper addresses first the issue of the perceptive aspect of memory and its potential impact on the nature of the ma‘nā, that is, the mental representation stored in the memory. It then deals with the status of veridical dream-visions vis-à-vis the outside reality and whether the corporeal form in the outside world can be said to be a representation, that is, an image, of the spiritual form in the mind at all.