Tabula Rasa

About Tabula Rasa

“A clean tablet, one from which the writing has been erased. A blank sheet of paper. A clean slate.”
— The mind, when unable to collect itself or remember any given circumstance, is termed metaphorically a tabula rasa in post-classical Latin, just as we say “a blank.” Among the Greeks the figure was common. Aristotle compares the mind to a “tablet on which nothing has been written,” ὥσπερ ἐν γραμματείῳ ᾧ μηθὲν ὑπάρχει ἐντελεχείᾳ γεγραμμένον (De Anima, 3, 4, 11); and Plutarch (Placita Philosophorum, 4, 11) speaks of the soul at birth, ὥσπερ χάρτης ἐνεργῶν εἰς ἀπογραφήν, as “so much paper ready for writing on.”
“Have not we already disposed of the difficulty about interaction involving a common element, when we said that mind is in a sense potentially whatever is thinkable, though actually it is nothing until it has thought? What it thinks must be in it just as characters may be said to be on a writing-tablet on which as yet nothing actually stands written: this is exactly what happens with mind.”
— Aristotle, De Anima 4, F5r

Quotes via Wikiquote (CC BY-SA), each with its original source.