Abstract
In Averroes’s view of the cosmos, living beings discern, animals imagine, individual human beings cogitate, humankind as a whole thinks, and intellects intuit and understand themselves. In other words, natural operations in living organisms are capable of discriminating between the useful and the harmful, animal nature processes images (intentions is Averroes’s term) from matter, individual men cogitate those images and the human intellect thinks insofar as it is considered a species, i.e., the human species. In this sense, the intellect of the human species thinks the sublunary world as one collective representation of the universe to be further abstracted and processed by higher levels of intellectual activity. A number of Renaissance philosophers, depending on how they interpreted the special relationship between intellects, the material intellect and bodily imaginations, elaborated a series of fascinating solutions in response to Averroes’s challenging view. This chapter focuses on the notion of the imagination – and dream imagination in particular – and intends to demonstrate the important role played by this faculty in unravelling some of the most notorious puzzles of Averroes’s philosophy. As will become clear over the course of this chapter, this role needs to be explored in all its various dimensions (metaphysical, epistemological, cosmological, medical and theologico-political).
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Notes
- 1.
Over the course of this chapter, I will use a number of words that took on specific technical meanings in the philosophical literature of the Middle Ages. It is worth reviewing them briefly: esse reale (reality insofar as it is in itself), esse intentionale (reality insofar as it is apprehended), intentio (apprehension), phantasma (representation of the imagination), cogitativa (the faculty of individual rationality), obiective (considered under the aspect of representations), subiective (considered under the aspect of substrata, i.e., physical subjects to be informed by their respective forms), forma informans (form as an actualising principle that inheres in the subject to be informed), forma assistens (form as an active principle that remains separate from the subject to be informed).
- 2.
Jacopo Zabarella, Liber de mente humana, in De rebus naturalibus (Frankfurt: Lazar Zetzner 1607), c. 964C.
- 3.
On the subject of early modern imagination see: Elizabeth R. Harvey, The Inward Wits: Psychological Theory in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (London: The Warburg Institute, 1975); Paola Zambelli, ‘L’immaginazione e il suo potere: Desiderio e fantasia psicosomatica o transitiva’, in Ead., L’ambigua natura della magia (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1991), pp. 53–75; Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (London: Pimlico, 1992); Phantasia ∼ Imaginatio, eds Marta Fattori and Massimo L. Bianchi (Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1998); Peter Mack, ‘Early Modern Ideas of Imagination: The Rhetorical Tradition’, in Imagination in the Later Middle Ages and Early Modern Times, eds Lodi Nauta and Detlev Pätzold (Leuven: Peeters, 2004), pp. 59–76; Bernd Roling, ‘Glaube, Imagination und leibliche Auferstehung: Pietro Pomponazzi zwischen Avicenna, Averroes und jüdischem Averroismus’, in Wissen über Grenzen. Arabisches Wissen und lateinisches Mittelalter, eds Andreas Speer und Lydia Wegener (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2006), pp. 677–699; Stuart Clark, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Guido Giglioni, ‘Fantasy Islands: Utopia, The Tempest and New Atlantis as Places of Controlled Credulousness’, in World-Building in Early Modern Natural Philosophy, ed. Allison Kavey (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 90–117; Id., ‘Coping with Inner and Outer Demons: Marsilio Ficino’s Theory of the Imagination’, in Diseases of the Imagination and Imaginary Disease in the Early Modern Period, ed. Yasmin Haskell (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), pp. 19–50.
- 4.
Aristotle, De anima, I, 1, 403a, trans. W. S. Hett (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936), p. 15. See also De anima, III, 8, 432a; De memoria et reminiscentia, 450a.
- 5.
Averroes, Commentarium magnum in Aristotelis De anima libros, ed. F. Stuart Crawford (Cambridge, MA: The Medieval Academy of America, 1953), p. 365; Id., Long Commentary on the De anima of Aristotle, ed. and trans. Richard C. Taylor (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 279.
- 6.
Giordano Bruno, De imaginum compositione, in Opera Latine conscripta, eds Francesco Fiorentino, Felice Tocco, Girolamo Vitelli, Vittorio Imbriani and Carlo Maria Tallarigo, 8 vols (Naples and Florence: Morano and Le Monnier, 1879–1891), II, iii, pp. 91, 198. The most recent edition of De imaginum compositione is in Opere mnemotecniche, eds Michele Ciliberto, Marco Matteoli, Rita Sturlese and Nicoletta Tirinnanzi, 2 vols (Milan: Adelphi, 2004–2009), II, pp. 488, 660.
- 7.
Alessandro Achillini, Quolibeta de intelligentiis, f. 3, c. 2: ‘nullus intellectus, nisi forte possibilis, intelligit aliquid extra se’, quoted in Bruno Nardi, Saggi sull’aristotelismo padovano dal secolo XIV al XVI (Florence: Sansoni, 1958), p. 188.
- 8.
Julius Caesar Scaliger, Hippocratis liber de somniis (Lyon: Sébastien Gryphe, 1539), p. 9.
- 9.
On the meaning of ‘cogitative’ faculty, see the clear and concise definition contained in Rudolph Göckel’s Lexicon philosophicum (Frankfurt: Matthias Becker’s widow, 1613), p. 380: ‘The cogitative faculty is the primary faculty of the senses, and is also called particular reason, for particular conclusions are drawn from it. Averroes maintains that one can find in Aristotle’s work the reference to an individual discerning faculty (virtus distinctiva individualis), that is, a virtue that distinguishes in an individual and not universal fashion.’ Göckel also adds, without making any reference to Averroes, that ‘sometimes the act of cogitating is taken for the imagination.’
- 10.
Zabarella, Liber de mente humana, c. 926C. See Thomas Aquinas, On There Being Only One Intellect, ed. R. McInerny (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1993), p. 85.
- 11.
Zabarella, Liber de mente humana, c. 930.
- 12.
Ibid., c. 928B. The image of the ship is already in Aquinas’s De unitate intellectus (On There Being Only One Intellect, p. 87).
- 13.
See Michael Blaustein, Averroes on the Imagination and the Intellect, PhD thesis, Harvard University, 1984; Richard C. Taylor, ‘Cogitatio, Cogitativus and Cogitare: Remarks on the Cogitative Power in Averroes’, in L’élaboration du vocabulaire philosophique au Moyen Âge, eds Jacqueline Hamesse and Carlos Steel (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000), pp. 110–146 (120); Emanuele Coccia, La trasparenza delle immagini: Averroè e l’averroismo (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2005).
- 14.
Blaustein, Averroes on the Imagination and the Intellect. For some of the meanings of intentio that are relevant here, see Göckel, Lexicon philosophicum, p. 255: ‘intentio nihil aliud est quam imago, hoc est, species rei’ (in a strictly optical sense); p. 256: ‘Intentionales dicuntur species sensiles, quia obiecta materialia sensui repraesentant.’
- 15.
See Nardi, Saggi sull’aristotelismo padovano, p. 217.
- 16.
Zabarella, Liber de mente humana, c. 962CD.
- 17.
Averroes, Commentarium magnum, p. 220: ‘Et dixit: et iste quasi sunt in anima, quia post declarabit quod ea que sunt de prima perfectione in intellectu quasi sensibilia de prima perfectione sensus, scilicet in hoc quod ambo movent, sunt intentiones ymaginabiles, et iste sunt universales potentia, licet non actu; et ideo dixit: et iste quasi sunt in anima, et non dixit sunt, quia intentio universalis est alia ab intentione ymaginata.’ See Id., Long Commentary on the De anima, pp. 171–172.
- 18.
Averroes, In metaphysica, in Aristotle, Opera cum Averrois commentariis, 12 vols (Venice: Giunta, 1562; repr. Frankfurt: Minerva, 1962), VIII, fol. 305rC.
- 19.
Ibid., fol. 305rAE. See also ibid., fols 180v–181r (natural virtues in seeds are ‘similes intellectui, scilicet quia agunt actiones intellectuales.’) Cfr. In de generatione animalium, ibid., VI, fol. 76rC: ‘haec nam virtus animata est similis arti, et continetur in genere naturae celestis: et id quod ipsam generat, est de necessitate quid separatum (sive immateriale) cum videatur agere in aliud absque instrumento corporeo. iam autem fuit declaratum in libro de Anima, quod huiusmodi res appellatur intellectus.’ See also Averroes, Compendia librorum Aristotelis qui Parva naturalia vocantur, ed. E. Ledyard Shields (Cambridge, MA: The Medieval Academy of America, 1949), p. 106.
- 20.
For Henry More’s interpretation of Averroes’s material intellect as a form of anima mundi, see Sarah Hutton’s essay in this volume. See also Alastair Hamilton, ‘A “Sinister Conceit”: The Teaching of Psychopannychism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment’, in La formazione storica dell’alterità: Studi di storia della tolleranza nell’età moderna offerti a Antonio Rotondò, eds Henry Méchoulan, Richard H. Popkin, Giuseppe Ricuperati and Luisa Simonutti, 3 vols (Florence: Olschki, 2001), III, pp. 1107–1127 (1115).
- 21.
Averroes, Commentarium magnum in Aristotelis de anima libros, p. 367; Id., Long Commentary on the De anima, p. 280.
- 22.
Scaliger, Hippocratis liber de somniis, p. 10.
- 23.
Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola, De rerum praenotione, in Opera omnia, 2 vols (Basel: Henricpetri, 1572–1573), II, p. 418.
- 24.
Pico, De rerum praenotione, p. 419.
- 25.
Ibid., p. 421.
- 26.
Ibid., p. 422.
- 27.
Ibid., pp. 422–423. See Francis Bacon, The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall, ed. Michael Kiernan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), pp. 130–131: ‘A certaine Rabbine, upon the Text; Your Young Men shall see visions, and your Old Men shall dream dreames; Inferreth, that Young Men are admitted nearer to God then Old; Because Vision is a clearer Revelation, then a Dreame.’ Both Pico and Bacon refer to Ioel, 2:28.
- 28.
Pico, De rerum praenotione, p. 423. On Moses of Narbonne’s theory of prophecy, see Alfred L. Ivry, ‘Moses of Narbonne’s “Treatise on the Perfection of the Soul”. A Methodological and Conceptual Analysis’, The Jewish Quarterly Review, 57 (1967), pp. 271–296.
- 29.
Zabarella, Liber de facultatibus animae, in De rebus naturalibus, c. 723C. Zabarella distinguishes only three internal senses: sensus communis, phantasia and memoria. See Coimbra Commentators, In tres libros de anima Aristotelis (Cologne: Lazar Zetzner, 1609), c. 393EF. On the internal senses in Averroes, see: Helmut Gätje. ‘Die “inneren Sinne” bei Averroes’, Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, 115 (1965), pp. 255–293; Deborah L. Black, ‘Imagination and Estimation: Arabic Paradigms and Western Transformations’, Topoi, 19 (2000), pp. 59–75; Ead., ‘Averroes on the Spirituality and Intentionality of Sensation’, In the Age of Averroes: Arabic Philosophy in the Sixth/Twelfth Century, ed. Peter Adamson (London and Turin: The Warburg Institute and Aragno, 2011), pp. 159–174.
- 30.
Coimbra Commentators, In tres libros de anima Aristotelis, c. 394C.
- 31.
Averroes’s Colliget (Kitāb al-Kulliyyāt fī ’l-ṭibb) was translated into Latin in Padua in 1255 by a ‘magister Bonacosa hebreus.’ Averroes’s commentary on Avicenna’s Cantica was translated around 1284 by Armengaud de Blaise of Montpellier. Bonacosa’s translation was first published in Venice by Otinus de Luna in 1497 and reprinted in an improved edition in the Giunta edition of 1572 with a book translated by Jacob Mantino. In 1537, Jean-Baptiste Bruyerin, nephew of Symphorien Champier, physician to Henry II and author of a De re cibaria published in 1560 in Lyon, translated Averroes’s Collectanea de re medica from Hebrew manuscripts. On Bruyerin, see P. Allut, Étude biographique et bibliographique sur Symphorien Champier (Lyon: Nicolas Scheuring, 1859), pp. 49–50; Ernst Renan, Averroès et l’averroïsme (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 2002), p. 267. See the recent Spanish translation of the original Arabic Kulliyyāt by María de la Concepción Vázquez de Benito and Camilo Álvarez Morales, El libro de las generalidades de la medicina (Madrid: Editorial Trotta, 2003) and their introduction to the volume (pp. 9–40). On Averroes’s medical views see: Francisco X. Rodriguez Molero, ‘La neurología en la “Suma anatómica” de Averroes’, Archivo Iberoamericano de Historia de la Medicina y Antropología Médica, 2 (1950), pp. 137–188; Id., ‘Originalidad y estilo de la anatomía de Averroes’, Revista Al-Ándalus, 15 (1950), pp. 47–63; Id.‘Averroes, médico y filósofo’, Archivo Iberoamericano de Historia de la Medicina y Antropología Médica, 8 (1956), pp. 187–190; Id., ‘Un maestro de la medicina arábigo-española: Averroes’, Miscelanea de Estudios Árabes y Hebraicos, 11 (1962), pp. 55–73; J. Christoph Bürgel, ‘Averroes ‘contra Galenum’. Das Kapitel von der Atmung im Colliget des Averroes als ein Zeugnis mittelalterlich-islamischer Kritik an Galen, eingeleitet, arabisch herausgegeben und übersetzt’, Nachrichten der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen, 1 (1967), pp. 263–340; E. Torre, Averroes y la ciencia médica (Madrid: Ediciones del Centro, 1974); Danielle Jacquart and Françoise Micheau, La médecine arabe et l’Occident médiéval (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 1996), p. 182 passim; Carmela Baffioni, ‘Further Notes on Averroes’ Embryology and the Question of the “Female Sperm”’, in Averroes and the Aristotelian Heritage, ed. C. Baffioni (Naples: Guida, 2004), pp. 159–172. On Averroes’s influence on medieval and Renaissance medicine, see: Heinrich Schipperges, Die Assimilation der arabischen Medizin durch das lateinische Mittelalter (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1964), pp. 137–138; Nancy G. Siraisi, Arts and Sciences at Padua. The Studium of Padua before 1350 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1973), p. 155; Charles B. Schmitt, ‘Renaissance Averroism Studied through the Venetian Editions of Aristotle-Averroes (with Particular Reference to the Giunta Edition of 1550–2)’, originally in L’averroismo in Italia (Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1979), pp. 121–142; repr. in Charles B. Schmitt, The Aristotelian Tradition and Renaissance Universities (London: Variorum Reprints, 1984), pp. 121–142, pp. 123, 140; Per-Gunnar Ottosson, Scholastic Medicine and Philosophy: A Study of Commentaries on Galen’s Tegni (ca. 1300–1450) (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1984), pp. 138–139; Edward P. Mahoney, ‘Albert the Great and the Studio Patavino in the Late Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries’, in Albertus Magnus and the Sciences. Commemorative Essays, ed. James A. Weisheipl (Bologna: Edizioni Studio Domenicano, 1994), pp. 537–563; Nancy G. Siraisi, Avicenna in Renaissance Italy. The Canon and Medical Teaching in Italian Universities after 1500 (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 248–253 (the case of Giovanni Battista Da Monte).
- 32.
Schmitt, ‘Renaissance Averroism Studied through the Venetian Editions of Aristotle-Averroes’, p. 124.
- 33.
See Luis García Ballester and Eustaquio Sánchez Salor, ‘Introduction’ to Arnald of Villanova, Commentum supra tractatum Galieni de malicia complexionis diverse, in Opera medica omnia (Granada and Barcelona: Publicacions de la Universitat de Barcelona, 1975-), XV, pp. 108–109.
- 34.
The discerning ability is one of the natural powers. See Averroes, Colliget, in Aristotle, Opera cum Averrois commentariis, Supplementum I, fols 20vG, 24rCD.
- 35.
See Taylor, ‘Remarks on the Cogitative Power in Averroes’, p. 124.
- 36.
Averroes, Colliget, fol. 9vGH.
- 37.
Ibid., fol. 18vM.
- 38.
Ibid., fols 21rF–21vG.
- 39.
Ibid., fol. 21vGL.
- 40.
Averroes, Colliget, fol. 24rCD.
- 41.
Jean Fernel, Physiologia, translated and annotated by John M. Forrester, with an introduction of John Henry and J. M. Forrester (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2003), p. 369.
- 42.
Averroes, Colliget, fols 16vM–17rAB.
- 43.
Ibid., fol. 17vHK.
- 44.
Agostino Nifo, De intellectu, quoted in Nardi, Saggi sull’aristotelismo padovano dal secolo XIV al XVI, p. 218. See Leen Spruit’s essay in this volume.
- 45.
Nardi, Saggi sull’aristotelismo padovano dal secolo XIV al XVI, p. 244.
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Giglioni, G. (2013). Phantasms of Reason and Shadows of Matter: Averroes’s Notion of the Imagination and Its Renaissance Interpreters. In: Akasoy, A., Giglioni, G. (eds) Renaissance Averroism and Its Aftermath: Arabic Philosophy in Early Modern Europe. International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d'histoire des idées, vol 211. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5240-5_9
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