De Anima

Information about De Anima

On the Soul (Greek Περὶ Ψυχῆς (Perì Psūchês), Latin De Anima) is a major treatise by Aristotle, outlining his philosophical views on the nature of living things. His discussion centres on the kinds of souls possessed by different kinds of living things, distinguished by the different life-processes those organisms go through. Thus plants have the capacity for nourishment and reproduction, the minimum that must be possessed by any kind of living organism. Lower animals have, in addition, the powers of sense-perception and self-motion (action). Humans have all these as well as intellect.

The notion of soul used by Aristotle is only distantly related to the usual modern conception. He holds that the soul is the form, or essence of any living thing; that it is not a distinct substance from the body that it is in; that it is the possession of soul (of a specific kind) that makes an organism an organism at all, and thus that the notion of a body without a soul, or of a soul in the wrong kind of body, is simply unintelligible. (He speculates that some parts of the soul--the intellect--may be conceived to exist without the body, but most cannot.) It is difficult to reconcile these points with the popular picture of a soul as a sort of spiritual substance "inhabiting" a body. Some commentators have suggested that Aristotle's term soul is better translated as lifeforce or Psyche, as it actually refers to the mind..

Division of chapters

Book I discusses the views of earlier philosophers and marks out the territory and method of investigation. A soul, it is concluded, will be that in virtue of which living things have life.

Book II contains Aristotle's organization of the three different kinds (or parts) of the soul, and how they figure into the lives of organisms. He discusses the "nutritive soul" and the "perceptive soul." (1) All species of living things, plant or animal, must be able to nourish themselves and reproduce others of the same kind. (2) All animals have sense-perception, thus they all have at least the sense of touch, which he argues is presupposed by all other senses, and the ability to feel pleasure and pain, which is the simplest kind of perception. If they can feel pleasure and pain they also have desire. Some animals in addition have other senses (sight, hearing, taste), and some have more subtle versions of each (the ability to distinguish objects in a complex way, beyond mere pleasure and pain.) He dicusses how these function. Some animals have in addition the powers of memory, imagination, and self-motion.

Book III is on the rational soul, which belongs only to rational animals, which are humans. Some of the later parts of this book return to earlier subjects in apparently inconsistent ways, suggesting to some that they were not originally part of this text and were added later by mistake. (Among these is the famous locus on the "active" or "agent intellect".)

Arabic Paraphrase

Just as there is an important Arabic paraphrase of Plotinus' Six Enneads -- The Theology of Aristotle, blending it with Aristotle's thought -- so there is an Arabic paraphrase of the De Anima, blending it with Plotinus' thought. Thus later Islamic philosophy and European philosophy which built on the Islamic texts were based on this Neoplatonic synthesis.

External links

Greek text: Mikros Apoplous (HTML), Académie de Nice (PDF)
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Ancient Greek refers to the second stage in the history of the Greek language^[1] as it existed during the Archaic (9th–6th centuries BC) and Classical (5th–4th centuries BC) periods in Greece.
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Latin}}}
Official status
Official language of: Vatican City
Used for official purposes, but not spoken in everyday speech
Regulated by: Opus Fundatum Latinitas
Roman Catholic Church
Language codes
ISO 639-1: la
ISO 639-2: lat
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Aristotle (Greek: Ἀριστοτέλης Aristotélēs) (384 BC – 322 BC) was a Greek philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great.
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The soul, according to many religious and philosophical traditions, is the self-aware essence unique to a particular living being. In these traditions the soul is thought to incorporate the inner essence of each living being, and to be the true basis for sapience.
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Intelligence is a property of mind that encompasses many related abilities, such as the capacities to reason, to plan, to solve problems, to think abstractly, to comprehend ideas, to use language, and to learn. There are several ways to define intelligence.
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Pleasure is commonly conceptualized as somehow opposed to pain or suffering, though it has received much less scientific attention. Arthur Schopenhauer, 19th Century German philosopher, understood pleasure as a negative sensation, as it negates the usual existential condition, that
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Pain is a sensation transmitted from sensory nerves through the spinal cord and to the sensory area of the cerebrum, where the sensation is perceived. It is defined by the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) as “an unpleasant sensory and emotional
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In psychology, memory is an organism's ability to store, retain, and subsequently retrieve information. Traditional studies of memory began in the realms of philosophy, including techniques of artificially enhancing the memory.
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Imagination is the ability to form mental images. It helps providing meaning to experience and understanding to knowledge; it is a fundamental facility through which people make sense of the world,^[1]^[2]^[3]
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Rationality as a term is related to the idea of reason, a word which following Webster's may be derived as much from older terms referring to thinking itself as from giving an account or an explanation. This lends the term a dual aspect.
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Active intellect or agent intellect is a term used in both psychology and philosophy.

Psychology

Active intellect, or active knowledge, is the psychological concept of knowledge being actively used (as opposed to passive knowledge).
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Platonism

Platonic idealism
Platonic realism
Middle Platonism
Neoplatonism

Platonic epistemology
Socratic method
Socratic dialogue
Theory of forms
Platonic doctrine of recollection
Individuals
Plato
Socrates

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The Theology of Aristotle was a paraphrase of parts of Plotinus' Six Enneads along with Porphyry's commentary into Arabic. It had a significant effect on early Islamic philosophy, due to Islamic interest in Aristotle.
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Martha Nussbaum (born Martha Craven on May 6, 1947) is an American philosopher with a particular interest in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, political philosophy and ethics.
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