Imagining Ourselves with Aristotle
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On three occasions in Rhetoric I.11, Aristotle alludes to a notion of a ‘phantasia of the self’: a concept that is explicitly broached, as far as I am aware, nowhere else in the Aristotelian corpus. The allusions are so fleeting that it would strain credibility to suggest that Aristotle really had a concept of ‘self-imagining,’ especially since his discussions of phantasia found in his general psychology (i.e., De Anima and the Parva Naturalia) already leave so much to the imagination, as it were. This thesis draws on Aristotle’s natural, psychological, and anthropological works in order to develop an Aristotelian concept of self-image, or, if to use a neologism, an ‘autophantasma.’ To determine the basic character of Aristotelian self-imagining, we proceed by determining Aristotle’s account of phantasia and phantasmatic images, on the one hand, and that of (human) selfhood on the other. While we look primarily to Aristotle’s general psychology to discern the nature of the phantasmatic and to the anthropological works (Nicomachean Ethics & Rhetoric) to account for the nature of self, we prioritize text that imbricates these orders of Aristotle’s thought to promote coherence in our model of Aristotelian autophantasma. The central aim of Part A (Prologue through Chapter 3) is to provide a comprehensive account of phantasia and phantasmata. Part B (Chapters 4 through Epilogue) then analyses the self’s structure, its most general animating object (the apparent good), its reception of that object through its ethos (character), and two registers of its social environment: one intimate, one political. Each dimension of our account of self shows not only that the work of phantasia is deeply and broadly implicated in its constitution and ongoing enactment but that self-relational exercises of phantasia already belong to the internal demands of many aspects of Aristotle’s thought. Thus, while the lines of the Rhetoric that reference the ‘phantasia of self’ may be at the margins of Aristotle’s thinking, they point to something that is, on the contrary, core and cardinal to the conceptual architecture underwriting his account of human selfhood.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".