De Anima Research Articles

Averroes' Doctrine of Material Intellect in the Long Commentary on the De Anima of Aristotle

Averroes' Doctrine of Material Intellect in the Long Commentary on the De Anima of Aristotle

The Priority of the Soul as Actuality in Aristotle’s De anima

The Priority of the Soul as Actuality in Aristotle’s De anima

Tertullian on the Afterlife: “Only Martyrs are in Heaven” and Other Misunderstandings

Abstract Perpetua only saw martyrs in heaven, according to Tertullian, De anima 55,4. This passage has perplexed scholars, since Tertullian seems to be referring to Saturus’s vision, not Perpetua’s (Passio Perpetuae et Felicitatis 13,8). Additionally, Tertullian’s citation is part of his larger argument against the Valentinians, in which he makes the peculiar claim that the souls of the dead are “below” (inferi) with the exception of the martyrs who are in Paradise. I contend that Tertullian’s claim has been misunderstood in the last few decades of scholarship because of a failure to contextualize his remark within his rhetorical strategy. Disentangling Tertullian’s convictions from his rhetoric is notoriously difficult, and yet by reading Tertullian as fully immersed in the tactics from the Second Sophistic Movement recent scholars have made great advances in our understanding of this North African Christian writer. Several of Tertullian’s other works provide counter-evidence to the idea that only martyrs go to heaven: specifically, Tertullian further defines “heaven,” its location, and its occupants; additionally, Tertullian clarifies who is a “martyr” in his wider oeuvre. When Tertullian’s own teachings on the afterlife are retrieved, then one can re-read De anima to see how Tertullian has cloaked these with rhetorical devices meant to refute the Valentinian notion of the soul’s ascent through multiple heavens. This idea that Tertullian believed only martyrs gain immediate access to heaven—which has often been repeated in the most recent century’s secondary literature—is itself a misunderstanding of earlier modern scholarship.

Book Review: Imagination and Art: Explorations in Contemporary Theory, (2020). Edited by Keith Moser and Ananta Ch. Sukla. Brill Rodopi

Aristotle thought that phantasia (imagination), perception, and mind were equally important. In one of his works, Aristotle described imagination as “that virtue of which an image occurs in us.” (De Anima iii 3 – 428aa1-2) The notion of what Cicero called “the mind’s eye” has recently been researched quite extensively as a “transdisciplinary project” in a solid and elegant collection of essays entitled Imagination and Art: Explorations in Contemporary Theory (2020) edited by Keith Moser and Ananta Ch. Sukla, who worked with an eclectic group of international researchers to compile a comprehensive study of the various facets of imagination. Organized in nine parts and presenting 38 essays, this collection is the most comprehensive contribution to the contemporary concept of imagination to date.

Black Bile, Manic Depression and Melancholy: Two Pillars of Our Understanding

I aim to demonstrate the movement of the argument of the Aristotelian Problem XXX.1 as it illuminates the phenomena of melancholy, which it is argued is more rightly understood as manic depression, and black bile. The discussion will aid contemporary researchers in psychiatry as well as those in ancient philosophy and medicine. An appeal to both Emil Kraeplin and the Aristotelian author will demonstrate surprising resonances. An appeal to Aristotle’s discussion of anger in the De Anima will make clearer what is at stake in Problem XXX.1.

A Pragmatic Theory of Everyday Imposition of Words in an Anonymous Thirteenth-Century Commentary on De anima (MS Prague, Metropolitan Chapter, M. 80, ff. 54vA–55rB)

The aim of this paper is to offer an edition of three anonymous questions on De anima II.8, contained in MS Prague, Metropolitan Chapter, M. 80, ff. 54vA–55vB and dated 1250–1260. The text offers an original theory of the everyday imposition of words. To present it, I (i) analyze the contemporary question-commentaries on De anima II.8; (ii) I present the theory of everyday imposition by discussing the analogies with, and differences from, Bacon’s contemporary pragmatic theory; and (iii) I discuss the hypothesis of the attribution of the text to Roger Bacon.

Are We Responsible for Laughing?

In his Commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima, Francisco Suárez offers a rich account of the psychology and physiology of laughter. Among other claims, he asserts that laughter is a voluntary act, without giving any further explanation. The aim of this paper is to glean from his texts a philosophically compelling argument for this claim. I will claim that for Suárez laughter is a commanded act of the will, since it somehow needs the will’s consent to be elicited. This kind of voluntariness is enough to make laughter morally relevant.

La importancia de los tratados psicológicos aristotélicos para los estudios retóricos

This note reviews the new translation of Aristotle’s De Anima and Parva Naturalia by Fred D. Miller Jr. Against its backdrop, the importance of these psychological treatises for interdisciplinary, rhetorical research is also analyzed, with special emphasis on both Aristotelian criticism and the arts of memory from Antiquity to the early modern period.

Критика Аристотелем принципа «подобное познается подобным» (комментарий к О душе II 5 416b 32 – 417a 20)

One of the principles underlying Aristotle’s theory of sense perception is that the sense faculty is potentially such as the sensible object is actually. On closer examination, this statement turns out to be a modernization of the ancient rule "like is known by like", shared by most of the early Greek philosophers, including Empedocles and Plato. The paper shows that though Aristotle criticizes this principle in his treatise On the Soul, he doesn’t really abandon it. On the contrary, he retains it for his own theory of sense perception while using the notions of the possible and the actual. The paper is written in the form of a line-by-line commentary to De anima II 5 416b 32–417a 20, where Aristotle reproaches his predecessors for the inconsistency and contradictions of their theories; shows that the “like is known by like” principle entails certain difficulties, and solves these difficulties by introducing his own theory of being moved and acted upon, according to which the patient is in a sense unlike the agent and in a sense like it.

Александр Афродисийский о душе как причине возникновения

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's commentary on the Aristotle's "Physics".

A comparative study on soul and life in the philosophy of Aristotle and Ibn Sina (with an emphasis on the book De Anima and Kitāb al-Nafs from al-Šifa’)

Numerous works have been written in different languages ​​about the nature of the soul and soul-body relations in the viewpoint of Aristotle. In the meantime, due to the high in­fluence that Ibn Sina has received from Aristotle in his philosophy, a considerable num­ber of these works have also been done as comparative studies on the psychology of Aris­totle and Ibn Sina. These works have explained the commonalities of the two philoso­phers as well as the differences that exist in Ibn Sina's psychology in definition of the soul, its essence, soul-body relations and so on. But no study has independently examined the difference between the soul and life in the viewpoint of Ibn Sina and nor compared these differences with what Aristotle expresses in his works. Our aim in this article is to compare the opinion of Aristotle and Ibn Sina about the nature of the soul and life, and to show how they think differently.

Aristotelische Biologie. Eine Synopsis

In no field of knowledge did Aristotle leave more writings than in biol­ogy. He conducted research for longer and more intensively in zoology than in any other field. In these writings he mentions a good 550 animal and 60 plant species. While this includes the internal anatomy of around 110 animals, he dissected 60 species himself. The present contribution deals with the epistemic motifs and the meaning of Aristotelian biology in the context of his scientific curriculum. It is thus demonstrated that in De anima Aristotle’s actual explanations are preceded by an investi­gation of the principles, which aims to differentiate living objects from inanimate ones, and to develop a method of explanation based on the species-specific vital functions of living beings. This article provides an overview of the four main disciplines of Aristotelian biology: compara­tive anatomy, physiology, genetics and behavioral research. The text offers tabular overviews of the animals and plants dealt with by Aristotle.

Internal Senses in Nicholas of Cusa’ Psychology

The paper considers the Nicholas of Cusa’ interpretation of Aristotle’ De anima with regard to the functioning of the internal senses in the knowing process: sensus communis, vis memorialis, vis aestimativa, phantasia, vis imaginativa. The not numerous references on the Aristotelian doctrine of the internal senses in Nicholas of Cusa' work are organized, for the first time in the recent historiography on medieval theory of knowledge, in a systematic and ordered philosophical reconstruction.

Self-Knowledge in Petrus Hispanus’ Commentary on the De anima

In the Sententia cum questionibus in libros De anima I-II Aristotelis (c. 1240), attributed to Petrus Hispanus, the recovered Aristotelian understanding of the soul does not completely replace the old Neoplatonic frame. Indeed, the commentary holds the existence of self-knowledge from the very beginning of the existence of the soul, before the acquisition of species. The aim of this paper is to describe Sententia’s view on self-knowledge analysing it in the context of its eclectic psychology and epistemology. I will attempt to demonstrate that, although the commentary is set in an explicit Neoplatonic framework, Petrus Hispanus seems to be quite uncomfortable within this framework and becomes increasingly committed to the Aristotelian doctrine and its vision of science.

The ethics of imagining and the dramaturgy of spectatorship

This article will address the ethical aspects of imagination and spectating. Since Plato’s denunciation of imagination in The Republic and Aristotle’s judgement in De Anima that ‘imaginings are for the most part false’, the notion of the human imagination has been controversial. In relation to theatrical performance, key issues concern how performance acts on the imagination of the spectator – and what actions of the spectator’s imagination might perform in return. In this article, I will address the ethics of imagination: as an examination of truth and falseness, as an issue of responsibility and choice, as a social imaginary and a narrative imagination that allows one to relate to the other, and finally as an exploration of the embodied basis of imagination, which again involves a questioning of the line between the real and the imaginary. In conclusion, I will take Sarah Kane’s Cleansed and Tim Crouch’s The Author as examples of two plays that explicitly address the ethics of imagining.

Pistis, Persuasion, andLogosin Aristotle

AbstractThe core sense ofpistisas understood inPosterior Analytics,De Anima, and theRhetoricis not that of a logical relation in which cognitively grasped propositions stand in respect to one another, but the result of an act of socially embedded interpersonal communication, a willing acceptance of guidance offered in respect to action. Even whenpistisseems to have an exclusively epistemological sense, this focal meaning ofpistisis implicit; to havepistisin a proposition is to willingly accept that proposition as a basis for some kind of activity (albeit possibly theoretical) as a result of some kind of communicative act. This is in accordance with Aristotle’s understanding of argumentation as a social practice, entered into in order lead others to certain actions, for certain ends. Understandingpistisin this way allows us to understand how it is thatpistisadmits of quantitative variation.

De Anima I e II: o movimento nos âmbitos vegetativo e sensitivo

Movement is a key concept in Aristotle’s physics and is largely used to explain changes in the sublunary sphere. It is especially investigated in the Physics and, as a concept, depends intrinsically on notions like actuality and potentiality. In this paper, I focus first on the theory of movement found in Physics III and V, then I analyze the ways it is used to define the soul itself and to explain the different vital phenomena – vegetative and sensitive activities – described in De Anima I and II.

Philosophies of Touch: from Aristotle to Phenomenology

Abstract This essay explores Aristotle’s discovery of touch as the most universal and philosophical of the senses. It analyses his central insight in the De Anima that tactile flesh is a “medium not an organ,” unpacking both its metaphysical and ethical implications. The essay concludes with a discussion of how contemporary phenomenology—from Husserl to Merleau-Ponty and Irigaray—re-describes Aristotle’s seminal intuition regarding the model of “double reversible sensation.”

Colloquium 1 The Authorship of the Pseudo-Simplician Neoplatonic Commentary on the De Anima

Abstract The traditional ascription of the Neoplatonic commentary on the De Anima to Sim­plicius has prominently been disputed by Carlos Steel and Fernand Bossier, along with J.O. Urmson and Francesco Piccolomini, among others. Citing problems with terminology, diction, cross-references, doctrine, and other features, these authors have argued that the commentary cannot have been composed by Simplicius and that Priscian of Lydia is a favored alternative. In this paper, I present some new arguments for why the traditional attribution to Simplicius is, in fact, the correct one. In particular, while addressing some of the terminological facts that have also been discussed by Christina Luna, Peter Lautner, Patricia Huby, and Philippe Vallat,1 among others, I offer a more secure basis for identifying the author of the De Anima commentary with Simplicius than has so far been proposed. In place of the disputes regarding terminology, which the debate has largely centered upon, I argue that certain unique and characteristic interpretive procedures, which one only finds in the undisputed Simplician works, allow us to identify the authorship of the De Anima commentary with Simplicius securely. Further, comparison of these methodological features with the extant works of Priscian rules out the possibility of his authorship of the commentary. I also provide some suggestions for resolving a few remaining issues of cross-reference between the De Anima commentary and the rest of Simplicius’s work. Finally, I conclude with some words on how that particular form of harmonization pursued by Simplicius’s contemporaries differs from both that of the De Anima commentary as well as his other works.

Colloquium 1 Commentary on Gabor

Abstract This paper gives a brief discussion of the problem of ascribing authorship to ancient philosophical texts when there is evidence both for and against traditional ascription. The case in point is tradition’s claim that Simplicius is the author of the De Anima commentary. It is argued here that, while Gabor provides new and important methodological evidence for Simplicius’s authorship, we should not expect certainty. It is suggested that, in cases where historical fact may never be ascertained, we will be better served by the notion of credences.