Aristotle's On the Soul

This is an earlier paper (1992), published in the journal of Ancient Greek philosophy, Apeiron. In de Anima Aristotle considers several candidate definitions aiming to answer the question, "What is a living thing?" And "What distinguishes living from non-living things?" I argue that, contrary to some commentators, Aristotle doesn't complete this task until DA II 3-4, and that his conception of a living thing is both teleological-- but also ecological. This alternative reading of de Anima has some modestly surprising implications for Aristotle's hylomorphism.

Aristoteles’ Werk »Über die Seele« gehört zu den wichtigsten, meistzitierten und -kommentierten Werken der Philosophiegeschichte – und gleichzeitig zu den schwierigsten, ja fast: gefürchtetsten. Helfende Kommentare gibt es seit der Antike, Forschungen wurden über das ganze Mittelalter hinweg bis in die Neuzeit angestellt.
Andree Hahmann legt hier einen Kommentar für unsere Zeit vor, der Schritt für Schritt die Argumentation nachvollzieht, durchsichtig macht und dabei auch die älteren Deutungstraditionen einbezieht und aufbereitet.

In this paper, I investigate the reappraisal of an academic manuscript, which I recently edited, in a later printed book issued by the same academic institution and addressing the same topic. This case study, whose main actors are two Jesuits lecturing on philosophy in Paris between 1564 and 1580, Juan Maldonado and Girolamo Dandini, focuses on the relation between handwritten and printed texts, and on the value of such a cross-reading.

What is Aristotle’s conception of thumos? This question can be broken down into two separate but related questions: (a) what is the object of desire for thumos, and (b) in which faculty of the soul is thumos grounded? The latter question is the focus of this paper. In this paper, “grounded in” is to be taken physiologically; the second question can be rephrased as “Which faculty of the soul is thumos a function of?” As a general rule Aristotle employs both a colloquial and a technical sense of thumos throughout the corpus. When I ask “What is thumos?,” I am interested in the technical sense that appears primarily in On the Soul and in the Nicomachean Ethics, where thumos is defined as a category of desire (a subset of orexis). The main argument of this paper is that Aristotle’s thumos is grounded in the faculty of phantasia – specifically, a sub-faculty called definite phantasia.

In Avicenna’s Nafs there are two investigations that run in parallel from its very beginning: (a) the investigation of the soul as a relational entity, always considered in connection with the body, and (b) that of the human soul in itself. Both investigations aim at ascertaining the existence and the essence of the soul, in relation to the body, of which it is the soul, and in itself respectively. The aim of this contribution is to reconstruct the phases of these investigations, in order to single out the way in which they are mutually related to each other, and to detect what acts as an indicator of the transition from the first, more general investigation to the second, more specific one. In my reconstruction, this role is assigned to the Flying Man experiment. In order to corroborate this interpretation, passages from three other Avicennian works (Ḥikma mašriqiyya or al-Mašriqiyyūn, Kitāb al-Išārāt wa-l-Tanbīhāt, and Risāla Aḍḥawiyya fī l-ma‘ād) are taken into account, since they contain the three other attested formulations of the Flying Man experiment, and an argumentative move similar to the one detectable in the Nafs.

In a brief class report on De Anima 1.2, I discuss Aristotle's method of the study of the soul. I bring into this context the insights of Ross, Bos, and Jaeger, on the lost account alluded to in De Anima, called On Philosophy. Finally I point to Konrad Gaiser's 'dimensional-ontological' account of the Aristotelian doctrine of the soul.

El presente artículo trata de reconstruir la eventual continuidad doctrinal en el tratamiento aristotélico entre el alma y el cuerpo. Primeramente, trataremos de problematizar las clásicas dicotomías en las que se ha intentado encajar la teoría hilemórfica con vistas a demostrar la imposibilidad de defender bien sea un dualismo o bien un monismo que resuma, con exactitud suficiente, el tratamiento aristotélico del alma. Finalmente, y a la luz de los planteamientos definitivos que parecen recogerse en 'De Anima', abordaremos un análisis comparado entre este tratado tardío y el examen de la relación entre el alma y el cuerpo contenido en los textos morales del Estagirita.

Aristotle’s treatment of tactility is at odds with the hierarchical order of psyche’s faculties. Touching is the commonest and lowest power; it is possessed by all sentient beings; thinking is, on the contrary, the highest faculty that distinguishes human beings. Yet, while Aristotle maintains against some of his predecessors that to think is not to sense, he nevertheless posits a causal link between practical intelligence and tactility and even describes noetic activity as a certain kind of touch.
This essay elucidates Aristotle’s analysis of the sense of touch in De anima and argues that tactility provides a paradigm for sensitivity in general and in particular for the reflexivity of sensation whereby the senses disclose not only what they are sensing but also that they are sensing. This feature, it is argued, has epistemological and ontological consequences. The sense of touch testifies to the physical presence of material beings and provides an empirical verification of substance’s essential feature, namely, self-reference.

This article analyzes the analogy made between Intellectus Agens and light, used by Aristotle in De Anima III, 5, commented by Aquinas. The investigation focuses on St. Thomas commentary, mainly on the limits of such analogy. It is shown how Thomas Aquinas is forced, in order to avoid the divinization of the Intellectus Agens, to bring a neoplatonic element to the discussion, incompatible with the Aristotelian spirit. References to the optic theories of Aristotle and Aquinas are made. It is dis­ cussed what it means to say that the Intellectus Agens is an act. Finally, it is shown why does the nature of the lntellectus Agens demand an intervention of the Separate Substances. The discussion focuses on the Sententia super De anima, and recurs to other works, mainly: Quaestiones disputatae De Anima, Summa Contra Gentiles, Summa Theologiae, De unitate intellectus contra Averroistas and De substantiis separatis ad fratrem Reginaldum.

Originally published at: Diametros nr 14 (grudzień 2007): 68 – 84

Much recent feminist critique of Aristotle focuses on how “woman” has been constructed, located, valued, and devalued in Aristotle’s political and moral philosophy, or on the biological determinism that appears to pervade his account of species reproduction. No doubt feminists have made valuable contributions to our understanding of women’s assigned roles in the histories of Western cultures, and hence to the emancipatory projects which define contemporary feminist theory.

Nonetheless, a good deal of comparative and analytical work remains to be done within Aristotle’s corpus in order to appreciate how and how deeply our conceptions of nature, essence, psychology, function, and life are informed by his philosophical legacy.

The aim of this essay is to contribute to one such project. Divided into two foci, I will first argue that Aristotle’s de Anima definition of what counts as a living thing relies on his claim that living things can move themselves and nonliving things cannot, and on the notion that by enumerating the powers or dynamis of liv­ing things he can establish their telos or final cause in a way that supports the psychic (vegetative, sentient, intellective) and social hierarchy (plants, animals, human beings) he goes on to develop in de Anima and elsewhere.

The second focus of this essay is to work out the implications of Aristotle’s view of living things for his psychic/social hierarchy, particularly with respect to the ambiguous place of women at the level of the intellective psyche.

Una modificación en la concepción sobre cómo traducir el término latino acribologia (de ἀκρίβεια: certeza, exactitud, esmero, rigor, perfección, severidad o precisión) tuvo incidencia en las discusiones epistemológicas y,  tangencialmente, orientó las discusiones en otros asuntos. Análisis del estado de la cuestión, en el contexto del pensamiento de Pietro Pomponazzi sobre el alma y su inmortalidad.

The present essay is the first part of an analysis regarding aspects of Aristotle’s ontology. Aristotle’s ontology is, in my opinion, a formal ontology that examines the fundamental structures of reality and that investigates the features belonging to entities such as substance, quantity, quality, universals. Aristotle’s ontology investigates, moreover, the reciprocal relations existing between these entities. Aristotle’s interpretation of universals is not, in my opinion, a nominalist interpretation of universals: I do not think Aristotle regards universals as being only mental entities. Aristotle, rather, aims at the differentiation between the realms of reality to which individuals and universals belong.
In this part of my investigation, I first expose my interpretation of the fundaments of Aristotle’s ontology. Thereafter, I concentrate my attention on chapter Metaphysics Zeta 13: I comment on Aristotle’s investigation regarding the ontological features belonging to the universal qua universal and to the substance qua substance.
I analyse the ontological laws that Aristotle finds about universal and substance: substance and universals are considered by Aristotle as mutually incompatible entities. The analysis shows that a false interpretation of the features of the universals endangers the whole ontology.
Moreover, the Third-Man-Regress, which is one of the consequences of the misunderstanding of the position of universals in the reality, is regarded as the key to the interpretation of one of Aristotle’s aims: Aristotle aims at the foundation of a typological ontology putting individual entities and universal entities on different levels of reality. The danger of the Third-Man-Regress is avoided through the introduction of a new ontology, that is, through the introduction of the typological ontology of the entities.
The uploaded version is the PDF of my Word essay. The published version can be found at the address: https://cis01.central.ucv.ro/analele_universitatii/filosofie/2017/Anale40_2.pdf

My PhD thesis deals with central aspects of Aristotle's doctrine of self-motion in Physics VIII, De Anima I and III and De Motu Animalium, taking the criticism of Plato's views as a starting point. The first chapter is devoted to the refutation of the claim that soul is a per subject of motion in De An. I 2-4; the second explores the dauntingly complex argument in Ph. VIII 1-6, paying special attention to the function of chapters 2 and 6; the third goes on to illuminate the discussion in De An. III 9-10 and it also clarifies the role of De Motu Animalium within Aristotle's overall approach to animal self-motion.

If you are interested in reading my thesis (either a chapter or the whole of it), just send a me an e-mail (antonio.ferro13@gmail.com) or a private message on Academia.

A defense of a naive reading of De Anima II 5, 417a21-29, against Michael Wedin’s interpretation according to which the passage describes the efficient causation of episodes of human thinking in terms of a specifically noetic process of “levels causation”. On the proposed naive reading, human thinking is typically embedded in contexts of human action. I explain how human action causes episodes of thinking, and consider different types of such practical contexts. The paper ends with a brief consideration of the possible limits of practically embedded thinking.

In my contribution, I deal with some aspects concerning the textures, which, in my opinion, represent the bearing structures of Aristotle’s ontology.
Throughout my investigation, I show that, within Aristotle’s ontology, the basic status of any individual/particular entity consists in its being an instance of a property or of a complex of properties: individual/particular entities are, constitutively, concretised properties. Neither bare entities, nor entities which could be neutral to all their properties, are admitted into Aristotle’s ontology; at least some properties represent the very framework of the individual/particular entities. Hence, essences do exist. Aristotle’s interpretation of individual/particular entities is an immediately essentialist one.
I show thereafter the presence, within Aristotle’s ontology, of features which constitutively determine the status of substance and of universal. The complex of the features related to substances and to universals implies the existence of ontological rules making up the framework of any substance as such and of any universal as such. These ontological rules precede the properties belonging to the particular concrete substances as members of a particular species or of a particular genus. Among the ontological rules which govern substances and universals, the rules stating the incompatibility between substance and universal deserve particular attention, since any transgression whatsoever committed against these rules can provoke the collapse of the whole ontology.
My analysis ends with the description of some facets regarding the role of the essence within the biological field. For this purpose, the soul as essence of biological entities is described in its function as principle of development of the living entities.
I base my inquiry on passages taken from the Metaphysics Mu and Zeta, the Posterior Analytics, the De Caelo, the Categories and the De Anima.

In De generatione Animalium Aristotle proposes a theory of embryogenesis and indicates its causes. An account of embryo’s animation plays an important role in this theory. From the moment of conception foetus is generated as a living and animated being, and its actual soul appears as a principle of its development and growth. However, until the embryo comes to perfection its soul is also incomplete. The animation of the embryo is a process which consists of successive actualization of its soul’s parts and powers. Parts of the soul are both the causes of generation and the actuality of yet non-perfected embryo. In this paper Aristotle’s conception of embryogenesis will be considered in the context of his doctrine of soul-parts and organic composition.

The “mind-body problem” seems consequent upon the modern reduction of the world to matter. Aristotle, in contrast, seems to avoid the difficulty by his characteristically ancient procedure. Beginning with the common understanding of living beings as ensouled bodies or embodied souls, without the modern zeal for radical doubt, Aristotle illuminates rather than further problematizes human nature.
Yet, this paper argues, De Anima encounters its own version of this problem. Nutrition avoids it because it is primarily of the body, with the soul operating only in the background. By inverse means, thought too avoids the problem. Perception alone seems equally and simultaneously physical and psychic. Where their inseparability and difference are most apparent, the difficulty emerges. How could perception be both material (physical) and immaterial (psychic)? Aristotle presents two alternative paradigms for perception, and consequently two possible responses. The first paradigm, sight, solves it by claiming perception belongs chiefly to the soul. Though sight perceives matter, it only perceives it through an immaterial medium called the transparent. If that which sight comes into contact with is immaterial, Aristotle concludes, sight is an immaterial power rather than a material organ. Like is known by like. The second paradigm, touch, presents the whole process as belonging chiefly to the body. Touch appears to be a bodily sense organ coming into physical contact with a foreign body. If this is the paradigm for perception, Aristotle seems to face the modern problem of how a purely material process can affect the soul.
Aristotle tentatively makes sight the paradigm for all the senses. But in attempting to apply this paradigm, he reveals the senses unavoidably follow the touch’s material paradigm in certain respects. By pushing the paradigm of sight as far as possible, Aristotle shows how understanding the soul requires we look primarily to such an account of the world and living beings. Yet the awareness of touch’s remaining claim and sight’s problematic character are not forgotten and offer further insights into the human being as embodied soul. De Anima may thus present a more illuminating, if more aporetic, treatment of the human.

De Anima II.4 opens Aristotle’s investigation of the various psychic faculties with the basic capacity shared by plants and animals alike: nutritive soul. He announces a three-step approach to be extended from nutritive soul to perceptive soul and intellect: to define a psychic faculty, first examine the functions it enables, and to understand the functions, examine the correlative objects—in the case of nutrition, food. This paper examines how the methodological prescriptions apply to nutritive soul and, focusing on the function of organic self-maintenance, argues that although the investigation of nutritive soul fits the stated program—food, self-maintenance, nutritive capacity—the order of investigation is the reverse of the order of explanation: the faculty is causally prior to the activity it enables, and the activity is prior to the correlative object, which is merely instrumental to that activity and to the psychic capacity. Moreover, the faculty is causally prior to its functions in three ways, as formal, final, and efficient cause. The paper does not speculate as to how the method extends to other psychic functions, but its analysis raises a question: Will Aristotle’s treatment of the higher faculties fit the prescribed method, and if so how?

As a subject of the first philosophy, the being as being is defined as the most universal and primary one. However, Aristotle proves in the Metaphysics that neither One nor being are substances, therefore they do not exist separately. Furthermore, in the De Anima he claims that those that are said to be universal are "either nothing or poste-rior", because they cannot be on its own in separation from the particular things. How, then, the universal being which can be named nothing or posterior postulated as the subject of first philosophy that is most worthy of knowing? And, on the other hand, if the being as universal is not a substance, on what ground it has it's unity? In order to answer these questions, I will consider Alexander of Aphrodisias' Commentary on Aristotle's Met-aphysics and also the Quaestio I.3 and I.11 of his Quaestiones.

The discussion about the soul in ancient philosophy is connected not only with consideration of the soul’s relation to the body, its capacities and functions of the living organism, but also with the question of generation, formation and animation of organic body, that has life potentially, in the womb. Considering the generation among the capacities of the nourishing soul, Alexander in De Anima Liber discusses the causes of embryogenesis. Among the causes of embryo’s development, he indicates the nourishing
capacity, which is transmitted from the parent through the seed, and the soul as a form of the parent, which acts in the embryo, since it is part of the mother, that is, before birth. The paper explicates Alexander's notion of the causes of animal’s generation in the context of his idea of the soul as capacity (δύναμις) and disposition (ἕξις) from the perspective of the Alexander's treatise "On the Soul" and Simplicius' commentary on the
Aristotle's "Physics".

El propósito de este trabajo consiste en destacar el papel central que tiene el problema de la divisibilidad del alma en los dos enfoques bajo los que se presenta la investigación psicológica aristotélica: el hilemórfico y el cardiocéntrico. Mientras que el primero sostiene que el alma es la forma o esencia del cuerpo entero, el segundo aboga por la localización del alma en el corazón, pues asegura que allí se manifiestan los principios de las partes o facultades anímicas. A simple vista, podría suponerse que existe una incompatibilidad entre ambos enfoques, ya que no tendría mucho sentido afirmar que el alma se halla en todo el cuerpo y, al mismo tiempo, decir que se encuentra exclusivamente en uno de sus órganos específicos. Entonces, la tesis de este trabajo es que el pneuma ofrece la clave para la conciliación de estos dos enfoques, dado que es el instrumento empleado por las partes del alma para desplegar sus funciones por todo el cuerpo. El corazón, como sede material de dichas partes, irradia el pneuma en forma de sangre por todo el organismo; y éste, hasta que no se extingue esa operación vital, preserva su esencia, causa formal o razón de ser de su existir. De este modo, el hilemorfismo resulta sustentado por el cardiocentrismo.

По Аристотелю, наука о природе занимается элементами и оду-
шевленными сущими, то есть — организмами. И те, и другие являются композитами из начал — формы и материи, которые соотносятся друг с другом как возможность и действенность. При рассмотрении подвижного как сущего из начал на первое место выходит его сложность как характеристика, от которой зависит определение его сущности или природы. В статье разбирается понятие сложного сущего с точки зрения физической науки Аристотеля, рассматриваются виды сложения материи, вводится понятие функции в отношении к организму.

'Bloomsbury Studies in the Aristotelian Tradition' promotes new approaches to Aristotelian philosophy and its history. Giving special attention to the use of interdisciplinary methods and insights, books in this series will appeal to scholars working in the fields of philosophy, history and cultural studies.

This papers intends to show that Aristotle's theory on the political nature of man implies a specific difference in relation to other animals and that this does not arise from his understanding of human beings as naturally vulnerable animals that would seek in political life an artifice to redress their insufficiency or individual vulnerability to live. The qualitative difference of human beings in relation to other animals-including political species, such as bees or ants-drives them to an equally specific type of life, whose foundation obeys values that ca be universalized. The political application of these values does not correspond to what is done in the domestic sphere, nor does it correspond to the mere transposition to a quantitatively superior community, because the universality of political values is extracted from what is understood by human beings as necessary for the realization of man as man, not man as an element of nature. Minha exposição se dirige ao aspecto natural da amizade (φιλία) em, principalmente, duas das obras ditas "zoológicas" de Aristóteles: História dos animais e, subsidiariamente, Geração dos animais. Esta opção tem uma motivação precisa: Alasdair MacIntyre, em seu livro Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues 1 , mobiliza a noção aristotélica da amizade entre os animais para mostrar que a autonomia individual para guiar ações por escolha racional não é de modo algum independente da animalidade e da vulnerabilidade implicadas em nossa condição animal. Prova disso, segundo o autor, é que as virtudes morais que orientam nossas ações resultam de nossa condição animal inicial (na infância) e que as virtudes seriam, de certo modo, uma resposta à vulnerabilidade dessa mesma condição. Em outras palavras, nossas relações morais seriam parcialmente definidas na fase infantil, quando aprendemos algumas normas * Agradeço ao Prof. David Lefebvre pela acolhida no Centre Léon Robin (Paris-Sorbonne) e pela esclarecedora discussão do presente texto (sem deixar de eximi-lo por eventuais equívocos).

How did the Jesuits teach philosophy during the sixteenth century? How did they organize lectures? What did they teach? How did they fit the current debates on hot topics such as the immortality of the soul, the relation between faith and reason, or the ancient authorities?

Anna Tropia will offer some insights on these important questions, by presenting the “De origine, natura et immortalitate animae” (about 1564) by the Spanish Jesuit, Juan Maldonado (1533/34 – 1583), a manuscript she has recently edited. This text is the only extant trace of the course that Maldonado taught in Paris in 1564, the first year after the inception of the Jesuit Collège de Clermont, but it provides precious details and a solid perspectives on how the Jesuit philosophical tradition would develop in the early modern period.