Sicut nauta navis. Sailorly elements for an archeology of late antique and medieval Aristotelianism

The image of the sailor and his ship as a metaphor for the soul/body relationship has a long history. The aim of this paper is to reconstruct it from Aristotle to Aquinas, showing how the “sailor” has enabled the constitution of an Aristotelian “psychology” (between the end of the 12th and the beginning of the 13th Latin century) in correspondence with a certain “Platonic” and Christian knowledge. In particular I would like to claim that even when the relationship between the body and soul expressed by this metaphor is explicitly rejected, the metaphor continues to inform the metaphysical coherence of every medieval interpretation of the soul as subsistent form.