Aristotle on the Daemonic in De divinatione

Abstract

I argue that the adjective δαιμόνιος (‘daemonic’) and the substantivized adjective τὸ δαιμόνιον (‘the daemonic’) that occur in Aristotle’s dream treatises basically mean ‘divine-like,’ denoting an illusory appearance of divine intervention, typically in the form of an alleged god-sent prophetic dream. Yet the appearances to which the terms refer are, in fact, neither divine nor supernatural at all, but involve merely coincidental correlations between the dream and the fulfilling event. It is shown that Aristotle’s use of ‘daemonic’ is traditional and reflects the endoxon that prophetic dreams are closely related to the divine. The paper also examines a set of earlier readings of the daemonic in De divinatione in relation to the proposed interpretation.