An Exchange on Phantasia Between Augustine and Nebridius
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89
In Letter 6 of Augustine’s correspondence, Nebridius asks his friend two questions on imagination: Is memory able to exist without phantasia ? Does phantasia not get its images from itself rather than from the senses? These questions arise from some texts by Plotinus and Porphyry, who referred to the beginning of Aristotle’s De memoria and to the famous Aristotelian claim that mind does not think without an image. Nebridius argues that thought has to use an image, either of a body or of a word, as a « vehicle » or as a « mirror ». Augustine, for his part, goes against the very principle of such a dependence of intellect on imagination in the case of man. The way he radically denies images any constructive role in the process of knowledge makes him original within Neoplatonism.
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