Localizing Memory and Recollection: The Sixteenth-Century Italian Commentaries on Aristotle’s De memoria et reminiscentia and the Question Concerning the Degrees of (dis)embodiment of the “Psychic” Processes

Abstract

In this paper I explore how early modern Italian Aristotelians understood Aristotle’s De memoria by focusing on three key-points of Aristotle’s theory of memory and recollection: (a) the localization of memory in the perceptual part of the soul; (b) the characterisation of phantasia and its association with the notions of koinē aisthēsis and prōton aisthētikon; (c) the definition of recollection as “a kind of syllogism” and its account as an activity that implies the faculty of deliberating and is therefore restricted to humans. My aim is to show the interactions as well as the tensions between natural philosophical and medical theories in reading and interpreting Aristotle’s Parva naturalia in the Italian milieu.