The Soul and its Instrumental Body

The Soul and its Instrumental Body PDF Author: A.P. Bos
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004247637
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 438

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.

The Soul and Its Instrumental Body

The Soul and Its Instrumental Body PDF Author: A. P. Bos
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9789004130166
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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.

Aristotle, On the Life-Bearing Spirit (De spiritu)

Aristotle, On the Life-Bearing Spirit (De spiritu) PDF Author: Abraham Paulus Bos
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047432681
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 219

Book Description
The work De spiritu is an important but neglected work by Aristotle. It clearly shows for the first time that Aristotle assumed a special body (pneuma) as the ‘instrument’ of the soul. By means of this soul/body the soul forms the visible body of plants, animals and human beings.

The Powers of Aristotle's Soul

The Powers of Aristotle's Soul PDF Author: Thomas Kjeller Johansen
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191633011
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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 on God's Life-Generating Power and on Pneuma as Its Vehicle

Aristotle on God's Life-Generating Power and on Pneuma as Its Vehicle PDF Author: Abraham P. Bos
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438468296
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 342

Book Description
Proposes an innovative rethinking of Aristotle’s work as a system that integrates his theology with his doctrine of reproduction and life. In this deep rethinking of Aristotle’s work, Abraham P. Bos argues that scholarship on Aristotle’s philosophy has erred since antiquity in denying the connection between his theology and his doctrine of reproduction and life in the earthly sphere. Beginning with an analysis of God’s role in the Aristotelian system, Bos explores how this relates to other elements of his philosophy, especially to his theory of reproduction. The argument he develops is that in talking about the cosmos, Aristotle rejected Plato’s metaphor of artisanal production by a divine Demiurge in favor of a biotic metaphor based on the transmission of life in reproduction, in which pneuma—not breath as it is often interpreted but the life-bearing spirit in animals and plants—plays a key and sustaining role as the vital principle in all that lives. In making this case, he defends the authenticity of the treatises De Mundo and De Spiritu as Aristotle’s, and demonstrates Aristotle’s works as a unified system that sharply and comprehensively refutes Plato’s, and in particular replaces Plato’s doctrine of the soul with a theory in which the soul is clearly distinguished from the intellect. “Bos offers a fresh, interesting, and important perspective. His interpretation will be very controversial, but if he is right, the standard Anglo-American interpretation of Aristotle will have to change radically.” — Malcolm Wilson, author of Structure and Method in Aristotle’s Meteorologica: A More Disorderly Nature

Plutarch in the Religious and Philosophical Discourse of Late Antiquity

Plutarch in the Religious and Philosophical Discourse of Late Antiquity PDF Author: Fernando Lautaro Roig Lanzillotta
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004234748
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Book Description
Either as insider or as sensitive observer, Plutarch provides us with exceptional evidence to reconstruct the spiritual and intellectual atmosphere of the first centuries CE. This collection of articles sheds important light on the religious and philosophical discourse of Late Antiquity.

Body and Soul in Hellenistic Philosophy

Body and Soul in Hellenistic Philosophy PDF Author: Brad Inwood
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108485820
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 275

Book Description
Explores Greek and Roman theories about the relationship of soul and body in the centuries after Aristotle.

Aristotle on Earlier Greek Psychology

Aristotle on Earlier Greek Psychology PDF Author: Jason W. Carter
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108574777
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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.

Aristotle's On the Soul

Aristotle's On the Soul PDF Author: Caleb Cohoe
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108485839
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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

Surgery and Selfhood in Early Modern England

Surgery and Selfhood in Early Modern England PDF Author: Alanna Skuse
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108843611
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 211

Book Description
Implements stories of surgical alteration to consider how early modern individuals conceived the relationship between body, mind, and self.