ABSTRACT
Platonists distrust mere appearances, and by and large the Platonic tradition in ancient thought is very suspicious o f phantasia , con trasting the apparent with the real and the imaginary with the true. Plato him self makes very little use o f the term phantasia : in Sophist 264b he defines phantasia as ‘a blend of perception and judgement (doxa)\ and earlier, at 235ff., he uses the related adjective phantastikos o f the lower o f two kinds o f imitation. In that passage he contrasts two types o f image-making, ‘eikastic’ and ‘phantastic’. Both are o f low value but ‘eikastic’ image-making does at least produce accurate likenesses; ‘phantastic’ image-making is even worse since it makes deceptive likenesses which only appear to resemble the origi nals but do not really do so. In Timaeus 70eff, however, he describes the liver as a mirror which receives eidola and phantasmata from the mind and so is capable of divination, whether in sleep or at other times when it is inspired by the gods.* 1 Neoplatonic accounts of phantasia on the whole combine a Platonist distrust o f appearances with a psychology derived from Aristotle. Phantasia occupies a key position at the ‘joint' o f the soul where rational and irrational meet. As in Aristotle it has close links with perception, but it also plays a
This paper draws on research done during my tenure of a Research Leave Award from the Humanities Research Board of the British Academy and I am grateful for their support.
