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The article offers a summary comparison of the chief pre-Aristotelian moral doctrines of the relation between desire and knowledge in its various forms: philosophy, art, sensibility, imagination, fancy. At the end of a path that includes the Sophists, Isocrates and Plato, the position of Aristotle, in both his youthful and his mature works, is presented. Within the general framework of the Aristotelian epistemology of praxis, attention is focused on the analysis of the positive function exercised by desire (and by the virtuous man, who possesses this desire in an outstanding form) in the knowledge of the good in particular situations. The author hypothesizes a direct influence of the Pythagorean and Isocratic doctrine on the Aristotelian image of a rhetorical structure of the soul.
