The Powers of Aristotle's Soul


Book Description

Aristotle is considered by many to be the founder of 'faculty psychology'—the attempt to explain a variety of psychological phenomena by reference to a few inborn capacities. In The Powers of Aristotle's Soul, Thomas Kjeller Johansen investigates his main work on psychology, the De Anima, from this perspective. He shows how Aristotle conceives of the soul's capacities and how he uses them to account for the souls of living beings. Johansen offers an original account of how Aristotle defines the capacities in relation to their activities and proper objects, and considers the relationship of the body to the definition of the soul's capacities. Against the background of Aristotle's theory of science, Johansen argues that the capacities of the soul serve as causal principles in the explanation of the various life forms. He develops detailed readings of Aristotle's treatment of nutrition, perception, and intellect, which show the soul's various roles as formal, final and efficient causes, and argues that the so-called 'agent' intellect falls outside the scope of Aristotle's natural scientific approach to the soul. Other psychological activities, various kinds of perception (including 'perceiving that we perceive'), memory, imagination, are accounted for in their explanatory dependency on the basic capacities. The ability to move spatially is similarly explained as derivative from the perceptual or intellectual capacities. Johansen claims that these capacities together with the nutritive may be understood as 'parts' of the soul, as they are basic to the definition and explanation of the various kinds of soul. Finally, he considers how the account of the capacities in the De Anima is adopted and adapted in Aristotle's biological and minor psychological works.




Aristotle's On the Soul


Book Description

Thirteen newly-commissioned essays that deepen our understanding of Aristotle's key concepts, including living, form, reason, and capacity.




Aristotle on Earlier Greek Psychology


Book Description

This volume is the first in English to provide a full, systematic investigation into Aristotle's criticisms of earlier Greek theories of the soul from the perspective of his theory of scientific explanation. Some interpreters of the De Anima have seen Aristotle's criticisms of Presocratic, Platonic, and other views about the soul as unfair or dialectical, but Jason W. Carter argues that Aristotle's criticisms are in fact a justified attempt to test the adequacy of earlier theories in terms of the theory of scientific knowledge he advances in the Posterior Analytics. Carter proposes a new interpretation of Aristotle's confrontations with earlier psychology, showing how his reception of other Greek philosophers shaped his own hylomorphic psychology and led him to adopt a novel dualist theory of the soul–body relation. His book will be important for students and scholars of Aristotle, ancient Greek psychology, and the history of the mind–body problem.




On the Soul


Book Description

'. . . the more honourable animals have been allotted a more honourable soul. . . ' What is the nature of the soul? It is this question that Aristotle sought to answer in De Anima (On the Soul). In doing so he offers a psychological theory that encompasses not only human beings but all living beings. Its basic thesis, that the soul is the form of an organic body, sets it in sharp contrast with both Pre-Socratic physicalism and Platonic dualism. On the Soul contains Aristotle's definition of the soul, and his explanations of nutrition, perception, cognition, and animal self-motion. The general theory in De Anima is augmented in the shorter works of Parva Naturalia, which deal with perception, memory and recollection, sleep and dreams, longevity, life-cycles, and psycho-physiology. This new translation brings together all of Aristotle's extant and complementary psychological works, and adds as a supplement ancient testimony concerning his lost writings dealing with the soul. The introduction by Fred D. Miller, Jr. explains the central place of the soul in Aristotle's natural science, the unifying themes of his psychological theory, and his continuing relevance for modern philosophy and psychology.




The Science of the Soul


Book Description

Aristotle's highly influential work on the soul, entitled De anima, formed part of the core curriculum of medieval universities and was discussed intensively. It covers a range of topics in philosophical psychology, such as the relationship between mind and body and the nature of abstract thought. However, there is a key difference in scope between the so-called "science of the soul," based on Aristotle, and modern philosophical psychology. This book starts from a basic premise accepted by all medieval commentators, namely that the science of the soul studies not just human beings but all living beings. As such, its methodology and approach must also apply to plants and animals. The Science of the Soul discusses how philosophers from Thomas Aquinas to Pierre d'Ailly dealt with the difficult task of giving a unified account of life and traces the various stages in the transformation of the science of the soul between 1260 and 1360. The emerging picture is that of a gradual disruption of the unified approach to the soul, which will ultimately lead to the emergence of psychology as a separate discipline.




The Soul and Its Instrumental Body


Book Description

Aristotle's definition of the soul should be interpreted as: 'the soul is the entelechy of a natural body that serves as its instrument'. The theory of a fine-corporeal body makes it much easier to understand Aristotle's position between Plato and the Stoics . This correction puts paid to all theories about a development in Aristotle's thought.




Nutrition and Nutritive Soul in Aristotle and Aristotelianism


Book Description

This volume is a detailed study of the concept of the nutritive capacity of the soul and its actual manifestation in living bodies (plants, animals, humans) in Aristotle and Aristotelianism. Aristotle’s innovative analysis of the nutritive faculty has laid the intellectual foundation for the increasing appreciation of nutrition as a prerequisite for the maintenance of life and health that can be observed in the history of Greek thought. According to Aristotle, apart from nutrition, the nutritive part of the soul is also responsible for or interacts with many other bodily functions or mechanisms, such as digestion, growth, reproduction, sleep, and the innate heat. After Aristotle, these concepts were used and further developed by a great number of Peripatetic philosophers, commentators on Aristotle and Arabic thinkers until early modern times. This volume is the first of its kind to provide an in-depth survey of the development of this rather philosophical concept from Aristotle to early modern thinkers. It is of key interest to scholars working on classical, medieval and early modern psycho-physiological accounts of living things, historians and philosophers of science, biologists with interests in the history of science, and, generally, students of the history of philosophy and science.




Being and Oil


Book Description

In the first ever book-length manifesto of Peak Oil Philosophy, Chad Haag argues that the transition to Fossil Fuel Modernity replaced the herds of megafauna of the Hunter Gatherer Worldview and the cyclically-harvested grain of the Agrarian Worldview with a single immensely powerful but quickly vanishing substance: oil. Everything we do is a euphemism for burning vast amounts of fossil fuels. Haag provides an original hierarchy of transcendental standards of meaning to reveal the extent to which our mythologies, systems, counter sense objects, and deep memes are just so many incomplete revelations of our Phenomenological awareness of petroleum. But as the globe already hit Peak Oil in 2005 and has been on the downward slope of depletion ever since, these higher order meanings have begun to collapse into falsity. Oil's peculiar role in sustaining systems of meaning precisely through imposing a hard physical limit to existence therefore requires a novel Ontology of Limitation. Haag reawakens the Heideggerian quest for Being by suggesting that even the subject itself must be understood as a limitation sustained through the limitation of, in our era, fossil fuels. Haag introduces a new table of 15 modes of truth to explicate how Peak Oil defies a simple binary of truth and falsity, given that even truth under Fossil Fuels is just a euphemism for oil's presence. Combining the Peak Oil insights of John Michael Greer and the anti-technological theories of Ted Kaczynski with the philosophical rigor of Heidegger, Aristotle, Zizek, Plato, Husserl, Descartes, and Jordan Peterson, Haag crafts a truly unique response to the challenge of joining Peak Oil and Philosophy.




The Cave and the Light


Book Description

The definitive sequel to New York Times bestseller How the Scots Invented the Modern World is a magisterial account of how the two greatest thinkers of the ancient world, Plato and Aristotle, laid the foundations of Western culture—and how their rivalry shaped the essential features of our culture down to the present day. Plato came from a wealthy, connected Athenian family and lived a comfortable upper-class lifestyle until he met an odd little man named Socrates, who showed him a new world of ideas and ideals. Socrates taught Plato that a man must use reason to attain wisdom, and that the life of a lover of wisdom, a philosopher, was the pinnacle of achievement. Plato dedicated himself to living that ideal and went on to create a school, his famed Academy, to teach others the path to enlightenment through contemplation. However, the same Academy that spread Plato’s teachings also fostered his greatest rival. Born to a family of Greek physicians, Aristotle had learned early on the value of observation and hands-on experience. Rather than rely on pure contemplation, he insisted that the truest path to knowledge is through empirical discovery and exploration of the world around us. Aristotle, Plato’s most brilliant pupil, thus settled on a philosophy very different from his instructor’s and launched a rivalry with profound effects on Western culture. The two men disagreed on the fundamental purpose of the philosophy. For Plato, the image of the cave summed up man’s destined path, emerging from the darkness of material existence to the light of a higher and more spiritual truth. Aristotle thought otherwise. Instead of rising above mundane reality, he insisted, the philosopher’s job is to explain how the real world works, and how we can find our place in it. Aristotle set up a school in Athens to rival Plato’s Academy: the Lyceum. The competition that ensued between the two schools, and between Plato and Aristotle, set the world on an intellectual adventure that lasted through the Middle Ages and Renaissance and that still continues today. From Martin Luther (who named Aristotle the third great enemy of true religion, after the devil and the Pope) to Karl Marx (whose utopian views rival Plato’s), heroes and villains of history have been inspired and incensed by these two master philosophers—but never outside their influence. Accessible, riveting, and eloquently written, The Cave and the Light provides a stunning new perspective on the Western world, certain to open eyes and stir debate. Praise for The Cave and the Light “A sweeping intellectual history viewed through two ancient Greek lenses . . . breezy and enthusiastic but resting on a sturdy rock of research.”—Kirkus Reviews “Examining mathematics, politics, theology, and architecture, the book demonstrates the continuing relevance of the ancient world.”—Publishers Weekly “A fabulous way to understand over two millennia of history, all in one book.”—Library Journal “Entertaining and often illuminating.”—The Wall Street Journal




Greatness of Soul


Book Description

Featuring a Nietzschean paragraph from Hume that smacks of Milton’s Satan, these pages also register how “claws and teeth” figure in Aristotle’s Greatness of Soul, and leave Hobbes to pose a still deeper challenge in the same vein. With poets, led by Milton, almost as thick underfoot as philosophers, we are given a glimpse of what a classical education might look like.