Abstract

The myth of the sirens presents a stratification of forms. In the 19th century, scientists led to a progressive “naturalizationµ moving it from imagination to marine zoology. This transformation provides a rich and fascinating history, but it ends up depriving the myth of its strong symbolic heterogeneity. The case study supports here a thesis: if taken out of the equivocation that would have it as a clumsy descriptor of external reality, mythical matter can restore its own value: becoming a reverberation of a tumultuous inner world on which philosophy can intervene to construct knowledge that is different from scientific knowledge but no less necessary for building a representation of the world.