Parva Naturalia Research Articles

Theologizing the Aristotelian Soul in Early Modern China: The Influence of Dr Navarrus’ Enchiridion (1573) over Lingyan lishao (1624) by Francesco Sambiasi and Xu Guangqi

Lingyan lishao 靈言蠡勺 [LYLS] (Humble Attempt to Discuss the Soul, 1624) by the Calabrian Jesuit Francesco Sambiasi (1582–1649) and the Chinese mandarin Xu Guangqi 徐光啓 (1562–1633) was the first Chinese-language treatise on the scholastic Aristotelian soul and a pioneering work in Sino–Western intellectual exchanges. Until now, the dominant assumption has been that the first volume (juan) of this work is simply an adaptation of the Coimbra commentaries on De Anima [DA] and Parva Naturalia [PN]. This article demonstrates, however, that while most of the first juan is based on these Coimbra commentaries, its treatise on the substance of the soul was likely derived from another source, namely the Enchiridion, a 16th century confessional manual by the Spanish Augustinian Martín de Azpilcueta (1492–1586), or Doctor Navarrus. Through a close textual comparison, this article shows how LYLS adopts the same structure, content, and citations of the Enchiridion to construct an accessible and concise theological definition of the soul that was better suited for the Chinese missionary context than the dense philosophic definitions of the Coimbra commentaries.

Binding Waste as Evidence for the Reconstruction of a Lost Aristotelian Manuscript

This note discusses the hypothetically reconstructed content of a fourteenth-century Latin manuscript of Aristotle's Parva naturalia, from which two bifolia survive as flyleaves in an incunable binding. The note argues that the lost manuscript contained a collection of Aristotelian treatises in combination with short texts by Avicenna and Thomas Aquinas, which had a limited circulation in German-speaking regions.

Психология Аристотеля

Aristotle was the first antient philosopher who systematically represented the doctrine of the soul (psychology) in the treatise “On the Soul” (De Anima) and in the minor natural science works called Parva naturalia, among which the most significant treatises are “De Sensu et Sensibilibus” and “De Memoria et Reminiscentia”. Aristotle considers psychology as the doctrine that explores the soul and its properties. He defines the soul as the principle of life, but the notion of life varies greatly depending on whether we are talking about a plant, an animal or a person. This Aristotle’s approach distinguishes his psychology from modern ones. Aristotle’s psychology considers all animate entities, and not just those who possess mind, that is, human beings. Aristotle gave a general definition of the soul as the first entelechy of the organic body. He also identified three types of souls depending on their functions: nutritive, perceptive and intellective. Each type of soul has certain properties and capacities. The nutritive soul nourishes, due to which a living being grows and lives, the perceptive soul perceives, and the intellective soul thinks.

Aristotele sull’analogia tra le facoltà cognitive degli esseri umani e degli altri animali / Aristotle on the Analogy between the Cognitive Faculties of Human Beings and Other Animals

<p>In <em>Historia animalium</em> VIII 1.588a18 ff., Aristotle describes the cognitive powers of non-human animals as sketches of human cognitive powers. According to the wording he chooses here, the cognitive powers of non-human animals are “traces” or “footprints” (ἴχνη, 588a19) of human ones. In this paper I explore the conceptual framework that lays behind this image, in order to show that it is much more than a rhetorical figure, and that Aristotle’s wording encompasses a whole articulated theory, whose details are set out in <em>De anima</em> and the <em>Parva naturalia</em>. Moreover, I try to clarify some technicalities of the scientific model he devises in order to explain certain features of the sensory-perceptual part of the soul (with particular attention to the perception of the so-called “common” and “incidental” sensory items) that bear a real analogy to the functions of reason and intellect, and that can consequently be considered their precursors.</p>

Материя сна. Византийские комментаторы XII – XV вв. о материальной причине сна в трактате Аристотеля "О сне и бодрствовании"

The paper gives a general description of the surviving Byzantine commentaries on Aristotle’s small psychological treatises traditionally known as Parva naturalia and describes the most notable manuscripts and editions of commentaries compiled by Michael of Ephesus, George Pachymeres, Theodore Metochites, Sophonias and Gennady Scholarios. The paper clarifies relationships of these texts to each other, discusses possible reasons of the renewal of interest in biological and physiological aspects of Aristotle’s philosophy among Byzantine scholars of the 12th – 15th centuries, and explains why the late antique commentary tradition paid little attention to particular issues of Aristotle’s philosophy of nature. Distinctive features of Byzantine exegesis are established by examining how Byzantine commentators dealt with some controversial questions of Aristotle’s treatise On sleep and waking, in particular the question of why Aristotle, after promising to consider the formal, final, effective and material causes of sleep, explores only three of these causes and leaves the material one without attention. We demonstrate that Byzantine commentators were convinced of the existence of the material cause of sleep and identified the latter with the hot evaporation that necessarily arises from food in the process of digestion. However, the analysis of this interpretation shows that it was based on a misunderstanding of the basic concepts of Aristotelian philosophy, since Byzantine exegesis was aimed more at preserving Aristotle's texts than at better understanding the general order of his philosophy.

The Art of Thinking and the Reception of the Parva naturalia in a Fifteenth-Century Hebrew Source

Abstract This article offers an insight into Yoḥanan Alemanno’s study of the ‘art of thinking’ through his notes from Averroes’s commentaries on Posterior Analytics, De anima and Parva naturalia. This case study represents an important example of the 15th-century Jewish learning based on the Arabic-Hebrew philosophical tradition and shows the continuity between the Provençal world and the Italian Renaissance. The textual appendix included at the end of the article aims at showing how Alemanno selected portions of Averroes’s commentaries on logic and psychology that define the role of the faculty of imagination and the processes through which we acquire true knowledge.

Galen and the Arabic Reception of Plato’s Timaeus, by Aileen R. Das

That philosophy and medicine provide complementary forms of knowledge of the same subject is attested several times, by many authors, in various ways. For example, at the beginning of De sensu et sensibilibus, the first treatise of the collection of writings entitled Parva naturalia, Aristotle says that the investigation of the first principles of health and disease pertains to the natural philosopher (φυσικός) since these states concern the living body, which is the subject matter of natural philosophy. Therefore, just as the investigation of most of the natural philosophers results in issues concerning medicine (τὰ περὶ ἰατρικῆς), that of the physicians who practise their art more philosophically (τῶν ἰατρῶν οἱ φιλοσοφωτέρως τὴν τέχνην μετιόντες) begins with issues concerning nature (ἐκ τῶν περὶ φύσεως) (Sens. 1, 436 a17-b1). This brief remark implies that, according to Aristotle, philosophical principles, especially those concerning nature, have to be assumed as points of departure in the art of medicine, whose boundaries are more restricted than those of natural philosophy. A similar consideration is found in the prologue to De anima. There, Aristotle contrasts the universal approach of the natural philosopher to all the activities and affections of the living body with the limited interest in some of them (περὶ τινῶν) displayed by craftsmen such as the carpenter or the physician (De an. I, 1, 403 b7-14). This passage contributes to refining the relationship between the natural philosopher and the physician: though sharing the same subject, the former investigates the whole, whereas the latter focuses on some selected parts.

Summaries and Comments

Summaries and Comments Elizabeth C. Shaw, Staff* and Mor Segev ARISTOTLE. Parva Naturalia with On the Motion of Animals. Translated by David Bolotin. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2021. xii + 248 pp. $45.00 This volume offers a translation of Aristotle's Parva Naturalia (PN) alongside De motu animalium (MA). Bolotin mainly uses Biehl's Teubner edition of Sens. and Mem., Muginer's Budé edition of the rest of the PN, and Louis's Budé edition of MA, but he pays attention to, and occasionally adopts, readings based on other editions. Deviations from the editions primarily used are often motivated by faithfulness to the manuscripts. Perhaps the greatest merit of Bolotin's numerous footnotes is that they routinely alert the reader to manuscript variants and editorial emendations, and to the differences in translation that might result from these. The footnotes also provide cross-references and explanations of Greek words, as well as Bolotin's interpretive stance on various issues. The translation itself aims at literalness, bracketing supplementations to the Greek and frequently adding parentheses transliterating key terms and difficult phrases. In places, Bolotin uses the same translation for different Greek words or translates occurrences of the same Greek word differently (thus, he uses "thought" for dianoia, doxa, and nous, and at times renders dianoia and nous also as "intellect"). These decisions are often (though not always) supplemented with transliterations in parentheses and/or explanatory footnotes. But even where a clarification is provided, it still would have been preferable for the choice of words in the translation to correspond more closely to the Greek. To better evaluate Bolotin's translation, let us compare Mem. 453a14–18 as it appears both there and in David Bloch's translation (Leiden, 2007): Bolotin: "A sign that the pathos is bodily and that recollection is a search for an appearance in something of that sort [that is, in something bodily,] is that it causes some people much annoyance when they are unable to recollect, even after directing their thought very much [toward doing so], and when they are no longer attempting [to], they recollect none the less." Bloch: "Now, that the affection is something corporeal, and that recollection is a search for an image in something of a corporeal type, [End Page 587] is proved by the fact that some people are bothered when they cannot recollect, even though they focus their thought extremely hard, and are still bothered even when they are no longer trying to recollect." Bolotin's "the pathos is bodily" reflects Biehl's text (esti sōmatikon to pathos), without indicating alternatives (Bloch's edition has sōmatikon ti to pathos). The square brackets in Bolotin's translation helpfully indicate what is inexplicit in Aristotle's text. The renditions of sēmeion as "[a] sign" and of parenochlein as "causes … much annoyance" are both in keeping with Bolotin's general aim at literalness and seem preferable to Bloch's respective choices. Bolotin merely transliterates pathos (Bloch: "affection"), here and elsewhere, arguing that it has "no adequate English equivalent." But since controversy rages over the proper translation of phantasma (Bolotin: "appearance"; Bloch: "image"), it would have been reasonable to leave it untranslated as well, or at least to allude to the controversy in a footnote (elsewhere in his translation, Bolotin does often transliterate phantasma and its cognate phantasia in parentheses). Finally, whereas Bolotin's reading of ouden hētton at 453a18 as indicating continued recollection has the merit of corresponding directly to the subsequent point about involuntary recollection (453a20–3), Bloch's understanding of it as indicating the persisting irritation after a failure to recollect plausibly produces an argument for the bodily involvement in recollection based not on the occurrence of involuntary recollection (without further explanation) but, rather, on a distinctly psychophysiological occurrence associated with recollection (see the comment on this part of the text in G. R. T. Ross's commentary [Cambridge, 1906]). Both readings are possible and have had their proponents. But, given the main goals of Bolotin's translation and the scope of his footnotes, it would have been useful for him to present the alternative reading here, and indeed to do so more frequently elsewhere. This could have...

Aristotle on Attention

AbstractI argue that a study of theNicomachean Ethicsand of theParva Naturaliashows that Aristotle had a notion of attention. This notion captures the common aspects of apparently different phenomena like perceiving something vividly, being distracted by a loud sound or by a musical piece, focusing on a geometrical problem. For Aristotle, these phenomena involve a specific selectivity that is the outcome of the competition between different cognitive stimuli. This selectivity is attention. I argue that Aristotle studied the common aspects of the physiological processes at the basis of attention and its connection with pleasure. His notion can explain perceptual attention and intellectual attention as voluntary or involuntary phenomena. In addition, it sheds light on how attention and enjoyment can enhance our cognitive activities.

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.

Трактат «О дыхании» и его место среди малых естественно-научных произведений (Parva Naturalia) Аристотеля

Трактат «О дыхании» и его место среди малых естественно-научных произведений (Parva Naturalia) Аристотеля

Interpreting Averroes: Critical Essays ed. by Peter Adamson and Matteo Di Giovanni

Reviewed by: Interpreting Averroes: Critical Essays ed. by Peter Adamson and Matteo Di Giovanni Stephen Ogden Peter Adamson and Matteo Di Giovanni, editors. Interpreting Averroes: Critical Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. ix + 262. Cloth, $105.00. For a philosopher whose moniker became "the Commentator" in recognition of his work on Aristotle, it is unfortunate how relatively few book-length commentaries and collections exist on Averroes (Ibn Rushd). This volume is thus a welcome and overall excellent scholarly offering on Averroes's own significant intellectual achievements—from logic to law, and medicine to metaphysics, all expounded by major experts. The editors pursue the laudable goal to furnish "a well-rounded portrait of Averroes's thought" within its proper context of Andalusian Islam, rather than its reception in the Latin West (2). They reasonably organize the volume, beginning with Averroes in his immediate religious settings (chapters 1–4), then moving through (roughly) the Aristotelian curriculum (chapters 5–12). The book is a worthy sequel to Adamson's Interpreting Avicenna (2013) in the same Cambridge series. It contains many new insights for specialists, even as it provides (with a couple of exceptions) a powerful gateway to newcomers. In fact, several of the chapters additionally serve as useful windows into some of the other important scholarship (both existing and forthcoming) from the collection's contributors. The book certainly succeeds in representing the rich background of Averroes's thought, which encompasses far more than Aristotle, including expansive Arabic adaptations of [End Page 751] Aristotle (see especially Rotraud Hansberger's outstanding chapter on the Arabic Parva Naturalia), the late antique commentary tradition, other Muslim philosophers (such as al-Fārābī, Avicenna, and Ibn Bājja), and pivotal mutakallimūn (rational theologians), namely, Ibn Tūmart and especially al-Ghazālī. It is hardly news that Averroes resists the dominant influence of al-Ghazālī, attempting to subvert the latter with Aristotelian demonstrative science. On the other hand, it is right and instructive that the volume urges understanding all of Averroes's works as likewise inflected by Islam and Ash'arite theology, even outside specifically dogmatic works, like the Incoherence of the Incoherence, overtly aimed at al-Ghazālī. Yet I worry that, at times, the shadow of al-Ghazālī and Ash'arism may be overstated. For example, Cristina Cerami's enlightening chapter (on how Averroes consolidates physics as a genuine science) sees al-Ghazālī and Ash'arite occasionalism as Averroes's "ultimate target" (e.g. 189 and 197), but the textual evidence is limited (188–89). If Ash'arism lies behind Averroes's far more frequent and explicit critiques of Avicenna—an intriguing thesis—readers will have to consult Cerami's other work for the full argument. Matteo Di Giovanni's opening chapter adeptly sets the theological and historical scene. But I am not convinced that Averroes's notorious doctrine of a single material intellect for all human beings falls out of concerns to secure philosophical speculation on the divine (contra al-Ghazālī), via the doctrine of conjunction with separate intellects (18–22). In Averroes's main and settled arguments on intellect, conjunction is not a primary motivation. Indeed, when he later turns to conjunction, he alters classic models of it precisely because of his new position on intellect (see Deborah Black's "Conjunction and the Identity of Knower and Known in Averroes," American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 73 [1999]: 159–84). But these are smaller challenges that invite further debate. The topic of intellect, however, is one of two notable lacunae in the book. It is surprising to find no substantive treatment (much less a chapter) devoted to Averroes's arguably most unique and famous doctrine on the unicity of the intellect. Besides Matteo Di Giovanni's brief discussion, David Wirmer only touches on it for background to his chapter (a formidable and engaging investigation on knowing essences of material things). Perhaps the editors felt that a substantial portion of Averroes scholarship already bears on the unicity of intellect, but for that very reason a chapter in such a volume can often benefit all readers (compare, for example, Dag Nikolaus Hasse's chapter in Interpreting Avicenna). Similarly, although Mokdad Arfa...

Significado y Mente en Aristóteles

Aristotle’s concern for meaning and mind, in the compact opening lines of De Interpretatione (16a3-8) together with the sequel of the next six chapters of this treatise, have been read (both historically and contemporary) in heavily different ways. Discrepancies reach even the kind of project this text carries out, whether engaged in a theory of language and meaning closely linked to Aristotle’s explanation of mental representation or rather engaged primarily in dialectical refutation without particular interest on meaning and mind. Yet, it is held -almost without exception among contemporary interpreters- that Aristotle explains (there and everywhere) meaning in terms of mental representation, and that somehow he takes mental representation to be dependent strongly on images which produce a mental likeness to the external object. So it goes nearly uncontested that mainly imagination must be responsible for meaning. This is a controversial assumption that I will dispute here by providing a detailed account of De Interpretatione (and some other related texts of the Organon) and by uncovering the psychological support for semantics (mostly found in De Anima and Parva Naturalia). Two main theses will be here argued for. First, I will contend that Aristotle is committed to a moderate linguistic conventionalism through which he can manage to preserve the intentional content of significant sounds as well as to avoid the shortcomings of any explanation of meaning in terms of images and likeness. Second, I will give several reasons Aristotle would have for explaining meaning on the basis of intellect rather than imagination. As a result, Aristotle will be exonerated from the common blame of having countenanced a natural imitation (based on images) to secure the reference of words.

Sleepwalking Through the Thirteenth Century: Some Medieval Latin Commentaries on Aristotle’s De somno et vigilia 2.456a24-27

In De somno et vigilia, Aristotle states that sleep is an incapacitation of the first sense organ that occurs when the capacity for sensation has been exceeded. In the same treatise, however, Aristotle also mentions the phenomenon of motion and other waking acts performed in sleep and claims that sense perception is a necessary condition for such acts to occur. When the medieval exegesis on the Parva naturalia evolved in the thirteenth century, how Aristotle’s remark on motion in sleep could be reconciled with his definition of sleep as an incapacitation of the senses became one of the most frequently discussed problems. This article analyzes the theories on this subject in the most influential commentaries on Aristotle’s treatises on sleep and dreaming in the thirteenth century.

ARISTOTELOVA ONTOLOGIJA DUŠE "QUA" FENOMENOLOGIJA DUŠE

<p>Da bismo ispravno razumeli razloge i motive za ovakav naslov rada, koji se tiče Aristotelove teorije o duši, potrebno je najpre da imamo na umu da za Stagiranina duša neminovno mora biti situirana u bivstvo. Ako uz tu činjenicu ne previdimo i nedvosmislene navode o tome da se duša ne može razmatrati van svoje smeštenosti u okvir ontološke baze koja počiva na diferenciji <em>dýnamis – en</em><em>érgeia</em><em> </em>(<em>entelékheia</em>), onda nam ne može promaći ni to da status duše mora biti ontološkog, a ne ontičkog karaktera. Primarni cilj Aristotelove „psihologije” time postaje utemeljenje usiologije duše, čime se suspenduje njeno smeštanje u puki niz kategorija bića, što je upravo rezultat prvobitno naznačenog karaktera duše, potvrđenog i shvaćenog kao bivstvo. Sa druge strane, dominantni karakter fenomenoloških strujanja u <em>De Anima </em>i spisima kasnije objedinjenim pod naslovom <em>Parva naturalia</em>, sugerišu nam to da je za nas daleko plodnije i povoljnije ukoliko istraživanja povedemo u pravcu fenomenologije duševnog, u suprotnosti sa pretumačenjem ontologije duše u smeru jedne <em>psychologia</em>-e <em>rationalis</em>.</p>

Pseudo-Aristotelian De spiritu: A New Case against Authenticity

Previous articleNext article No AccessNotes and DiscussionsPseudo-Aristotelian De spiritu: A New Case against AuthenticityPavel Gregoric and Orly LewisPavel GregoricUniversity of Zagreb Search for more articles by this author and Orly LewisHumboldt-Universität zu Berlin Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Classical Philology Volume 110, Number 2April 2015 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/680674 Views: 57Total views on this site Citations: 2Citations are reported from Crossref [© 2015 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved]PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Hynek Bartoš, Colin Guthrie King Heat, Pneuma, and Soul in Ancient Philosophy and Science, 18 (Feb 2020).https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108651714Börje Bydén Introduction: The Study and Reception of Aristotle’s Parva naturalia, (Sep 2018): 1–50.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26904-7_1

How Theology, Imagination, and the Spirit of Inquiry Shaped Natural Philosophy in the Late Middle Ages

Historians of science have long debated historiographical issues and have even come to regard some of them as rather passe. The issues I shall consider will be applied to late Middle Ages and, where necessary, extended to early modern period, or, as I shall refer to it, Scientific Revolution. In broad range of medieval science and philosophy, I shall focus almost exclusively on philosophy, because, as we shall see, philosophers posed questions that probed all aspects of world: nature, supernatural, and an imaginary world of hypothetical and possible.1 It included bits and pieces of virtually all of contemporary sciences, as well as thoughts and ideas that would be appropriate to that only came into being in modern era. It was not until of astronomy, optics, and mechanics - exact sciences, known as middle sciences to Aristotle and his followers in late Middle Ages - became fully integrated with philosophy in seventeenth century that early modern science emerged. Although process of integration began in Middle Ages, it accelerated rapidly in seventeenth century. The importance of union between exact and philosophy was truly significant. Other societies that at one time had well-developed mathematics and astronomy, but failed to generate, and maintain, a well-developed philosophy, eventually saw their mathematical fade away. A prime example is civilization of Islam.2 In what follows, I shall focus on two basic issues that are most relevant to philosophy and should be of great interest to historians of science. I shall first consider influence of theology and religion on philosophy and exact sciences; and then investigate a topic that, although connected to first theme, emphasizes role of reason, imagination, and counterfactuals, which taken together produced a spirit of inquiry that encouraged investigation of nature and development of science. Because philosophy is focus of my essay, I shall now present a brief summary of highlights of medieval philosophy.NATURAL PHILOSOPHY IN THE LATE MIDDLE AGESDuring Middle Ages, philosophy was solidly based upon Aristotle's natural books [libri naturales], which included Physics, On heavens, On generation and corruption, Meteorology, On soul, and The short physical treatises (Parva naturalia). Since these works treated different aspects of physical cosmos, philosophy ranged over all aspects of physical world that involved change. For most scholastic philosophers, subject matter of philosophy was 'mobile being [ens mobile]', a term that Thomas Aquinas used. 'Mobile being' rather than 'mobile body' was used because it embraced motion of both material and immaterial substances. Natural philosophy was concerned with change as manifested by things in some kind of motion. As an anonymous fourteenth-century author expressed it, the whole of movable being is proper subject of philosophy.3 Most of subjects discussed were drawn from broad range of Aristotle's philosophy.Medieval philosophy was presented in three quite different literary formats. The first, commonly in use through most of thirteenth century, was commentary. In this format, whichever of Aristotle's books was subject of commentary, author would present a few lines of Aristotle's text and then explain them while also commenting on them. He would then do same for text immediately following, and move through entire treatise in same fashion, paragraph after paragraph until commentary was completed. The second, and most popular, way of proceeding was by way of a series of questions, each of which usually began with word 'whether [utrum] In Physics, we could readily meet a question such as Whether existence of a vacuum is possible; in On heavens, we might confront question Whether whole earth is habitable; from Meteorology, a question on visual rays would be fairly common, such as Whether every visual ray is refracted in meeting a denser or rarer medium; and in questions on On generation and corruption, it would be frequently asked Whether elements remain [or persist] formally in a compound [or mixed] body. …

Leben und Werk des Prager Professors und Rektors Wikbold Stutte aus Osnabrück (14. Jahrhundert)

Wicbold Stutte of Osnabrueck, Master of Arts and of Medicine at the 14th century University of Prague and Rector there in 1375, has been known until recently only through some documents. An examination of the codex Mainz, Stadtbibliothek, Hs I 613, uncovered for the first time a literary work of Wicbold’s, viz. a voluminous commentary on (part of) Aristotle’s ‚Parva naturalia‘. A first reading of this work and further special research yielded finally a list of twelve writings done or projected by Wicbold, three of which are known at present to be extant, viz. the just mentioned philosophical work and two medicinal ones. This contribution describes Wicbold's quite impressive career, both academical and clerical (section I), gives a list of his explicits as far as available (section II) and gives finally a list of the known documents regarding Wicbold's life and career (section III).

Some biological aspects of Aristotle's glottology

Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 B. C) was for a long time an authority on ancient grammatical theory. His formulations of word categories supplemented by abundant logical and rhetorical considerations, made foundations for traditional linguistic concepts of grammar. He dealt with these matters almost throughout all his life, leaning on the knowledge of his predecessors, especially Plato and other philosophers. The author of this paper states that there was yet another field of investigation important for Aristotle especially in last the 25 years of his life, which contributed to his grasp of human language. Those were his biological preoccupations, which resulted in the works Historia animalium, De generatione animalium, De Partibus animalium, Parva naturalia. In these books he separated himself from Plato's dualism, treating human being as part of the living world, after his thorough empirical research of the systems and functioning of more than 500 animal species he knew. In several titles he insists that there is language only in man (T? l?g? chr?tai m?noz t?n z??n d anthr?poz, De generatione animalium 7, 786 b 2). That is his own discovery. He analyzes the role and function of all the organs by which the language is produced: mouth, lips tongue, larynx, palate, nose, then stream of air, etc. Doing so, he formulates in fact an early type of phonetics. The author of the paper further indicates that this 'biological' knowledge of Aristotle's should be confronted and paralleled with his 'grammatical' formulations, which should lead to a more complete image of Aristotle's glottology, a theory of language in broader sense than linguistics of today. As for the physei - th?sei traditional division among ancient Greek philosophers, Aristotle did not seem to care a lot, but one can conclude that Aristotle thought of language as being kat? synth?k?n, i. e. of arbitrary nature.

Thirteenth and Fourteenth-Century Commentaries On the De LONGITUDlNe Et Brevitate Vitae

AbstractThe article seeks to summarise recent research carried out by the author into thirteenth and fourteenth-century commentaries on the De longitudine et brevitate vitae. The texts of some representative commentaries are examined as a means of assessing the reception of Aristotle's natural philosophy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. As this is an area which has received comparatively little attention from researchers up to now, it is hoped that in examining commentaries on this one text of the Parva naturalia what emerges might serve to give a clearer picture of the reception and understanding of Aristotle's natural philosophy. The article also contains some brief comments on the two medieval translations of the De longitudine, by James of Venice and William of Moerbeke. In an appendix, a transcription of the prologue to Walter Burley's commentary is also included.