| Summary: | <p>Aristotle is the first philosopher in the Western tradition to engage philosophically with the phenomenon
of metaphor. Despite his pioneering role I will argue here that his account of metaphor has been widely
misrepresented or simply misunderstood. This thesis reconstructs his theory of metaphor against the
background of contemporary philosophy of metaphor. I proceed in three steps. Firstly, I develop an
interpretation of Aristotle’s remarks about proper and deviant words which lays the foundation for
Aristotelian metaphors. In a second step I apply these findings to the account of metaphor he develops in
Poetics 21. I argue that Aristotle provides a consistent classification of metaphor against a majority of
scholars who think he does not, that his account is not dependent on the notion of substitution, and that
he does not defend a semantic theory of metaphor. Finally, in my third chapter I make a fresh start at a
theory of metaphor in Aristotle, building primarily on his account of similarity as well as his discussion of
ways of seeing a portrait in the <em>Poetics</em> and <em>De memoria</em>. I conclude that Aristotle unites Gricean and noncognitivist strands in his thinking about metaphor, accounting both for the communicative as well as the
associative and creative side of metaphor.</p>
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