Name: De Anima (On the Soul)
ISBN: 9780140444711

Aristotle

Hugh Lawson-Tancred

Examines the nature of life, discusses form, matter, potentiality, and realization, and includes information on the background and themes of the work. Bibliogs

De Anima (On the Soul)

For the Pre-Socratic philosophers the soul was the source of movement and sensation, while for Plato it was the seat of being, metaphysically distinct from the body that it was forced temporarily to inhabit. Plato's student Aristotle was determined to test the truth of both these beliefs against the emerging sciences of logic and biology. His examination of the huge variety of living organisms - the enormous range of their behaviour, their powers and their perceptual sophistication - convinced him of the inadequacy both of a materialist reduction and of a Platonic sublimation of the soul. In De Anima, he sought to set out his theory of the soul as the ultimate reality of embodied form and produced both a masterpiece of philosophical insight and a psychology of perennially fascinating subtlety.

"Assertion is also of something and that something is the case, as is also negation and all cases admit of truth or falsty. But this is not the way with all thought; rather the thought of what a thing is will be veridical if it is in respect of what it is for the thing to be what it is, nor is this assertion of something that something is the case. There is a paralle with the way that the sight of a special sensible is veridical, whereas that of whether a white thing is or is not a man will not always be so. It is the same way with those things that are without matter"

Eva Cace

Moram priznat da me ova knjiga umorila

"Assertion is also of something and that something is the case, as is also negation and all cases admit of truth or falsty. But this is not the way with all thought; rather the thought of what a thing is will be veridical if it is in respect of what it is for the thing to be what it is, nor is this assertion of something that something is the case. There is a paralle with the way that the sight of a special sensible is veridical, whereas that of whether a white thing is or is not a man will not always be so. It is the same way with those things that are without matter"

Teodora Živulović

DeoDone Gous

Alexander Lobov

Zeke Taylor

Greta V. 

Cristian Rus

Knowledge, however, is an attribute of the soul, and so are perception, opinion, desire, wish, and appetency generally; animal locomotion also is produced by the soul; and likewise growth, maturity, and decay. Shall we then say that each of these belongs to the whole soul, that we think, that is, and perceive and are moved and in each of the other operations act and are acted upon with the whole soul, or that the different operations are to be assigned to different parts?-from Book IThe writings of Greek philosopher ARISTOTLE (384BC-322BC)-student of Plato, teacher of Alexander the Great-are among the most influential on Western thought, and indeed upon Western civilization itself. From theology and logic to politics and even biology, there is no area of human knowledge that has not been touched by his thinking.In De Anima-which means, literally, On the Soul-the philosopher ponders the very nature of life itself. What is the essence of the lifeforce? Can we consider that plants and animals have souls? How does human intellect divide us from other animals? Is the human mind immortal?All these questions, and others that seem unanswerable, are explored in depth in this, one of the most important works ever written on such eternal questions. Students and armchair philosophers will find it a challenging-and rewarding-read.