Aristotle on Foresight through Dreams
Aristotle on Foresight through Dreams
This chapter examines Aristotle's thoughts on divination. As with Plato, his most detailed thinking on divination centres on dreams. He positions noncoincidental prescient dreams as examples of surplus knowledge that are provocative, and he sets out to attempt to explain them. The cognitive event underlying them is nondiscursive, happens in a lower region of the soul, and emerges from the cusp of physiology and psychology. Unlike with Plato, we do not have a range of references to the phenomenon across the corpus, which we might aggregate and use to discern facets of his views. Instead, we have a concentrated treatment in one treatise, On Divination during Sleep. The text is the shortest among his surviving corpus, and it is entirely justified to take this as a rough index of its importance to him, relative to such larger issues as ethics, the structure of animal bodies, or causation.
Keywords: Aristotle, ancient divination, dreams, surplus knowledge, On Divination during Sleep
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