Phantasia occupies a pivotal position in the depth-psychology corpus that draws on ancient philosophy, functioning as the cognitive bridge between perception, memory, and desire. The term resists easy translation: rendering it 'imagination' imports visual and creative connotations that distort Aristotle's technical usage, wherein phantasia names both a capacity and its products—sensory representations (phantasiai) that mediate between perceptual input and desiderative output. The central tension in the scholarly literature runs between two readings: one emphasizing phantasia as interpretive faculty that presents objects as relevant to an animal's desires (Nussbaum's position, engaged critically by Inwood and Lorenz), and another stressing its role as a necessary condition specifically for locomotion-directed desire, not for desire per se. Lorenz's sustained exegesis in The Brute Within establishes that Aristotle does not require phantasia for every desire, only for those that impel purposive movement from place to place—a distinction with significant consequences for understanding non-rational animal psychology. The Stoic inheritance is equally significant: Inwood demonstrates that phantasia retains its activating function in Stoic psychology of action, though with different epistemological underpinnings. Aristotle's bipartite division into perceptual and deliberative (rational) phantasia structures the debate about which cognitive achievements can be attributed to non-human animals. The term thus sits at the crossroads of philosophy of mind, ethics, and animal psychology.
phantasia is the perceptual or noetic stimulus for the activation of the desiderative state... it provides the interpretive force which brings the object of perception or thought into connection with the animal's desires
Inwood argues that phantasia functions in both Aristotelian and Stoic psychology as the activating mediator between cognitive input and desire, presenting objects as relevant to the animal's desiderative states.
, Ethics and Human Action in Early Stoicism, 1985thesis
Affections suitably prepare the organic parts, desire [sc. suitably prepares] affections, phantasia [sc. suitably prepares] desire; and phantasia arises through thought or through perception
Lorenz cites Aristotle's 'chain of movers' passage to establish phantasia as the indispensable intermediate link between cognition and desire in the production of animal movement.
, The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle, 2006thesis
what he is committed to, so far as non-rational motivation is concerned, is not that phantasia is required for the formation of every desire, but that it is required for the formation of desires that impel animals to engage in locomotion
Lorenz's central interpretive claim restricts Aristotle's requirement for phantasia to locomotion-directed desires, not to all desire formation, reframing the entire debate about animal motivation.
, The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle, 2006thesis
A more serious shortcoming of 'imagination' as a translation of phantasia is that it cannot be used when the Greek word denotes, not a mental capacity, but a product of its exercise—that is, a sensory representation.
Lorenz establishes the terminological necessity of retaining 'phantasia' untranslated, since the term covers both a cognitive faculty and its products (sensory representations), a duality 'imagination' cannot capture.
, The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle, 2006thesis
in animals there is neither thinking nor reasoning, but there is phantasia... Aristotle suggests that we take phantasia to be 'like a kind of thinking'
Lorenz reads Aristotle as positioning phantasia as a cognition available to non-rational animals that approximates but is categorically distinct from thought, forming the basis for non-human purposive behavior.
, The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle, 2006thesis
Every phantasia is either such as to involve reasoning or perceptual. In the latter, then, the other animals share also
Lorenz foregrounds Aristotle's bipartition of phantasia into rational (deliberative) and perceptual kinds, with the latter available to non-human animals and serving as the basis for their non-rational motivation.
, The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle, 2006thesis
Forming a desire that can support, and account for, goal-directed locomotion requires having some suitable phantasia... Envisaging a prospect, then, is a cognitive task that a subject must actually perform if it is to engage in purposive locomotion.
Lorenz argues that phantasia is cognitively necessary for purposive locomotion because it alone can fulfill the task of envisaging prospective situations that perception by itself cannot accomplish.
, The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle, 2006thesis
The former he treats as a case of phantasia. This distinction is made close to the end of chapter 1, where Aristotle responds to the difficulty of how it can be that what is remembered is not a sensory affection
Lorenz traces the boundary Aristotle draws between memory proper (re-enactment with awareness of past interaction) and mere re-enactment, which is classified as phantasia, situating the term within the broader theory of perceptual retention.
, The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle, 2006supporting
memory also of intelligibles does not occur without a phantasia... Aristotle rather naturally extends this idea and claims that visualizing is required, not only for grasping an object of thought in the first place, but also for subsequent acts of remembering
Lorenz demonstrates that Aristotle extends phantasia's necessity beyond perception and desire into the domain of intellectual memory, making it indispensable even for the retention of intelligibles.
, The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle, 2006supporting
phantasia as defined in the Sophist is a state or disposition of reason, and one which involves acceptance... This of course has little or nothing to do with phantasia as Aristotle conceives of it.
Lorenz contrasts Plato's Sophist definition of phantasia (a belief-like rational disposition formed through perception) with Aristotle's non-rational, perceptually-grounded conception, marking a sharp conceptual discontinuity.
, The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle, 2006supporting
It has been one of my purposes to call attention to some Platonic antecedents of Aristotle's concept of phantasia. One precursor to Aristotle's phantasia is memory, the preservation of perception
Lorenz identifies the Platonic heritage of Aristotle's phantasia concept, locating its precursor in the Philebus's account of memory as preserved perception that enables desire formation in depleted animals.
, The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle, 2006supporting
phantasia and perception to have the same range of objects... Phantasia can thus apprehend, not only perceptual
Lorenz establishes that Aristotle's generous conception of perception extends equally to phantasia, enabling it to apprehend a rich range of objects beyond simple sensory qualia.
, The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle, 2006supporting
for animals which are capable of locomotion, what imparts locomotion to them is the capacity for desire acting in concert with the capacity for phantasia
Lorenz articulates Aristotle's position that locomotion in capable animals is produced by the joint operation of desire and phantasia, while noting this does not entail that all desiring animals possess phantasia.
, The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle, 2006supporting
perception and, in particular, phantasia, as he conceives of them, can, or anyhow are meant to be able to, account for an animal's ability to envisage prospects that are suitable to its circumstances
Lorenz argues that Aristotle's perceptual system, especially phantasia, is designed to explain how non-rational animals reliably envisage circumstance-appropriate prospects without recourse to thought.
, The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle, 2006supporting
Phantasiai only come in later, in section (3), when Aristotle turns to thought, apparently intending a contrast to what precedes: 'But to the thinking soul, phantasiai serve as percepts.'
Lorenz observes that in De Anima 2.2 phantasiai emerge specifically in relation to the thinking soul, where they perform the role percepts play for sense-bound animals, suggesting a hierarchical cognitive function.
, The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle, 2006supporting
One crucial point of contact between thought and phantasia is that both can present prospective courses of action, and, in doing so, provide the cognitive underpinnings needed for the formation of desires that impel animals to engage in movement
Lorenz identifies the shared function of thought and phantasia in presenting prospective action, while maintaining their categorical difference and Aristotle's restriction of thought to rational animals.
, The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle, 2006supporting
the retention of such affections requires that disturbances created by acts of perception are in some way or other preserved in the animal's perceptual apparatus... These disturbances, moreover, are contentful.
Lorenz details the physiological substrate of phantasia—contentful disturbances preserved in the perceptual apparatus—linking the psychological capacity to Aristotle's account of dreaming and sensory retention.
, The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle, 2006supporting
A number of texts in the De Anima commit Aristotle to the view that it is possible for an animal to be capable of desire without being capable of phantasia.
Lorenz marshals textual evidence from De Anima 2.3 to support the position that desire and phantasia are not universally co-extensible, confirming his restricted reading of phantasia's necessity.
, The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle, 2006supporting
he does not say that human phantasia involves reasoning, whereas phantasia in non-human animals... At a later stage in his development, Aristotle came to think that all animals are capable of locomotion and phantasia, at least in rudimentary and indeterminate ways.
Lorenz considers a developmental interpretation of Aristotle's apparent inconsistencies regarding which animals possess phantasia, suggesting a shift toward attributing it universally in at least minimal form.
, The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle, 2006supporting
phantasia for Aristotle should properly denote not a wide general faculty for the interpretation of the data of sense-perception but a specific faculty that we possess to produce in our minds imagery related to, but not identical with, that of the sense.
The De Anima commentary identifies a competing conception of phantasia as mental imagery production, distinct from the interpretive faculty reading, noting that Aristotle's text leaves the relationship between the two seriously underacknowledged.
, De Anima (On the Soul), -350supporting
A city without desire is, in sum, a city of no imagination. Here people think only what they already know... Whenever any creature is moved to reach out for what it desires, Aristotle says, that movement begins in an act of the i[magination]
Carson uses Aristotle's connection between desire and imagination (phantasia) as a poetic and philosophical foundation for her argument that eros, imagination, and the reaching toward what is absent are structurally intertwined.
, Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay, 1986aside