Excavating the Imagination: The Arabic Afterlife of Aristotle's Phantasia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation focuses on the afterlife of Aristotle’s work on the imagination, specifically in the work of al-Farabi, Ibn Rushd, and Maimonides. Drawing on previous scholarship that has investigated the philosophical and psychological role of the imagination in Aristotle, this dissertation considers the role that Aristotle’s Rhetoric had to play in later Arabic readings of Aristotle. This dissertation demonstrates that it wasthe rich life of Aristotle’s Rhetoric in the Arabic world that lead to a slow-burning association of imagination and politics. For al-Farabi, Ibn Rushd, and Maimonides, the imagination is the psychological feature of human beings that make us susceptible to persuasive speech. Since the images of imagination in human beings are restrained and directed by the rational faculty, they can also be directed, although not restrained, by the power of persuasive speech. The imagination allows human beings to imagine the world differently from the way it is, but at the same time it is not intrinsically capable of ascertaining which future or change is good. But human reason, with its deliberative powers, allows us to distinguish between persuasion based on emotional triggers and habitual desires and the truly remarkable innovations that can stem only from the partnership between imagination and reason. In thought the evolution of the idea of the imagination was linked with an appreciation of Rhetoric, absent in the Latin world, which manifested in concerns about persuasion, manipulation, reactionary potential of the imagination. They turn to reason as a bulwark against the power of desire and anger, and therefore the means by which we can avoid being led entirely by our emotions and the images that they invoke.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| 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".