La cera di Aristotele

The analogy of the wax, introduced by Democritus in relation to sense-perception and readapted by Plato in connection with memory, plays a fundamental role in Aristotle’s philosophy of mind, being used to illustrate on the one hand the capacity of the living being to receive and retain “sensations and images”, and on the other its inextricably psychophysical unity. Starting from the analysis of the passages in which the analogy of the wax occurs, the paper proposes to investigate first its meaning in the context of Aristotle’s theory of perception and imagination, and then its role in the definition of the living being.