In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle suggests that a moral principle 'does not immediately appear to the man who has been corrupted by pleasure or pain'. Phantasia in Aristotle's Ethics investigates his claim and its reception in ancient and medieval Aristotelian traditions, including Arabic, Greek, Hebrew and Latin. While contemporary commentators on the Ethics have overlooked Aristotle's remark, his ancient and medieval interpreters made substantial contributions towards a clarification of the claim's meaning and relevance. Even when the hazards of transmission have left no explicit comments on this particular passage, as is the case in the Arabic tradition, medieval responders still offer valuable interpretations of phantasia (appearance) and its role in ethical deliberation and action. This volume casts light on these readings, showing how the distant voices from the medieval Arabic, Greek, Hebrew and Latin Aristotelian traditions still contribute to contemporary debate concerning phantasia, motivation and deliberation in Aristotle's Ethics.

"In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle suggests that a moral principle 'does not immediately appear to the man who has been corrupted by pleasure or pain'. Phantasia in Aristotle's Ethics investigates his claim and its reception in ancient and medieval Aristotelian traditions, including Arabic, Greek, Hebrew and Latin. While contemporary commentators on the Ethics have overlooked Aristotle's remark, his ancient and medieval interpreters made substantial contributions towards a clarification of the claim's meaning and relevance. Even when the hazards of transmission have left no explicit comments on this particular passage, as is the case in the Arabic tradition, medieval responders still offer valuable interpretations of phantasia (appearance) and its role in ethical deliberation and action. This volume casts light on these readings, showing how the distant voices from the medieval Arabic, Greek, Hebrew and Latin Aristotelian traditions still contribute to contemporary debate concerning phantasia, motivation and deliberation in Aristotle's Ethics."--Bloomsbury Publishing.

The early Greek Stoics were the first philosophers to recognize the object of normal human perception as predicative or propositional in nature. Fundamentally we do not perceive qualities or things, but situations and things happening, facts. To mark their difference from Plato and Aristotle, the Stoics adopted phantasia as their word for perception. This term had been coined by Plato to designate "deceptive appearance," a combination of sensation and judgment, and the Stoics turned this sense to positive account, by linking it to the ground-breaking work of Plato and Aristotle on predication, the framing of propositions. To corner the Sophist, in his Sophist, Plato had argued that phantasia was of the nature of judgment and statement, capable of truth and falsity. The Stoics made phantasia or propositional perception the starting point and basis for their propositional logic, and showed that the revealing power of perception is carried over in the formation of logical propositions and the interrelation of propositions in signs and proof. Author Jeffrey Barnouw proposes new interpretations and translations for other characteristic Stoic terms in addition to phantasia, including lekton, pragma, axioma, huparchein, ptosis, tunchanon, emphasis, endeiktikon and metabasis. Barnouw also demonstrates a multi-faceted and deep affinity between Stoic logic and the semiotic logic of Charles S. Peirce.

The ethics of Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), and virtue ethics in general, have enjoyed a resurgence of interest over the past few decades. Aristotelian themes, with such issues as the importance of friendship and emotions in a good life, the role of moral perception in wise choice, the nature of happiness and its constitution, moral education and habituation, are finding an important place in contemporary moral debates. Taken together, the essays in this volume provide a close analysis of central arguments in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and show the enduring interest of the questions Aristotle raises.

V. 1. Science.

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