Feeling Fantastic: Emotions and Appearances in Aristotle

This paper takes up the claim of some recent commentators that Aristotle, in the Rhetoric, supposed that emotional experience involved things merely appearing to the subject to be as they are represented, rather than the subject’s actually taking them to be so. Supposedly this represents a better interpretation of the Rhetoric (especially Aristotle’s use of phantasia (appearance) and cognates in connection with the emotions) and a better philosophical position for Aristotle. I shall argue that the claimhas neither of these merits