This essay explores Aristotle’s conception of the soul. Aristotle believes that natural objects and their behaviour cannot be fully understood in terms of their material constituents and their properties, but have to be explained in terms of their essence or nature. Souls are simply a particular kind of essence or nature, namely the essence or nature of animal bodies. Doing justice to physical or natural phenomena requires the notion of a form or nature. Once this notion is allowed, it is (...) strong enough to account for all that one would want a soul to account for – life, the things living objects do, and even the so-called affections of the soul. (shrink)

I examine the passages where Aristotle maintains that intellectual activity employs φαντάσματα (images) and argue that he requires awareness of the relevant images. This, together with Aristotle’s claims about the universality of understanding, gives us reason to reject the interpretation of Michael Wedin and Victor Caston, on which φαντάσματα serve as the material basis for thinking. I develop a new interpretation by unpacking the comparison Aristotle makes to the role of diagrams in doing geometry. In theoretical understanding of mathematical and (...) natural beings, we usually need to employ appropriate φαντάσματα in order to grasp explanatory connections. Aristotle does not, however, commit himself to thinking that images are required for exercising all theoretical understanding. Understanding immaterial things, in particular, may not involve employing phantasmata. Thus the connection that Aristotle makes between images and understanding does not rule out the possibility that human intellectual activity could occur apart from the body. (shrink)

I offer a novel interpretation of Aristotle's psychology and notion of rationality, which draws the line between animal and specifically human cognition. Aristotle distinguishes belief (doxa), a form of rational cognition, from imagining (phantasia), which is shared with non-rational animals. We are, he says, “immediately affected” by beliefs, but respond to imagining “as if we were looking at a picture.” Aristotle's argument has been misunderstood; my interpretation explains and motivates it. Rationality includes a filter that interrupts the pathways between cognition (...) and behavior. This prevents the subject from responding to certain representations. Stress and damage compromise the filter, making the subject respond indiscriminately, as non-rational animals do. Beliefs are representations that have made it past the filter, which is why they can “affect [us] immediately.” Aristotle's claims express ceteris paribus generalizations, subject to exceptions. No list of provisos could turn them into non-vacuous universal claims, but this does not rob them of their explanatory power. Aristotle's cognitive science resolves a tension we grapple with today: it accounts for the specialness of human action and thinking within a strictly naturalistic framework. The theory is striking in its insight and explanatory power, instructive in its methodological shortcomings. (shrink)

I reconstruct Aristotle’s reasons for thinking that the intellect cannot have a bodily organ. I present Aristotle’s account of the aboutness or intentionality of cognitive states, both perceptual and intellectual. On my interpretation, Aristotle’s account is based around the notion of cognitive powers taking on forms in a special preservative way. Based on this account, Aristotle argues that no physical structure could enable a bodily part or combination of bodily parts to produce or determine the full range of forms that (...) the human intellect can understand. For Aristotle, cognitive powers with bodily organs are always spatiotemporally limited, but the understanding is not. Aristotle claims that our understanding applies to all instances of the thing understood wherever and whenever they exist. On Aristotle’s own account the intellect in its nature is only “potential,” it does not actually possess any form. Thus nothing prevents it from possessing all forms. (shrink)

Historians of psychology often treat Aristotle’s De Anima as the first scientific treatment of their subject; and historians of biology do likewise with his zoological treatises. How are the investigations recorded in works such as the Parts of Animals and History of Animals connected to those in the De Anima? More specifically, given Aristotle’s views about man’s special and distinctive cognitive capacities, what does he think about man as an object of a distinctively zoological investigation? In the following pages, this (...) more specific question will be explored, but with an eye to the way in which its answer may change the way we think about the broader question. (shrink)

Desperately difficult texts inevitably elicit desperate hermeneutical measures. Aristotle's De Anima, book three, chapter five, is evidently one such text. At least since the time of Alexander of Aphrodisias, scholars have felt compelled to draw some remarkable conclusions regarding Aristotle's brief remarks in this passage regarding intellect. One such claim is that in chapter five, Aristotle introduces a second intellect, the so-called 'agent intellect', an intellect distinct from the 'passive intellect', the supposed focus of discussion up until this passage.1 This (...) view is a direct descendent of the view of Alexander himself, who identified the agent intellect with the divine intellect.2 Even the staunchest defender of such a view is typically at a loss to give a plausible explanation of why the divine intellect pops into and then out of the picture in the intense and closely argued discussion of the human intellect that goes from chapter four through to the end of chapter seven.3 Revolting against an extravagant postulation of entities, Michael Wedin, for example, has argued with considerable subtlety and ingenuity that there is in fact only one intellect discussed in De Anima.4 This unified intellect is fully capable of being integrated into Aristotle's hylomorphic psychology. In order to make his case, though, Wedin is himself forced (1) to discount the importance of some texts and (2) to interpret others in a way that strains credulity. (shrink)

Aristotle not only formulates the problem of intentionality explicitly, he makes a solution to it a requirement for any adequate theory of mind. His own solution, however, is not to be found in his theory of sensation, as Brentano and others have thought. In fact, it is precisely because Aristotle regards this theory as inadequate that he goes on to argue for a distinct new ability he calls "phantasia." The theory of content he develops on this basis (unlike Brentano's) is (...) profoundly naturalistic: it is a representational theory, formulated in terms of the causal powers and physical magnitudes of the body. (shrink)

There is prima facie evidence that Theophrastus naturalized nous to the extent that he spoke of it in naturalizing terms. But our evidence also suggests that Theophrastus accepted the reasons Aristotle had for excluding nous from the reach of natural philosophy. We show that, far from revealing an inconsistency on Theophrastus’ part, this apparent tension results from a consciously adopted strategy. Theophrastus is developing one aspect of Aristotle’s account of nous he found underdeveloped and feared might be misunderstood, namely the (...) infrangible organic unity of the whole human being, including its nous. That is why he insists that nous, although ‘from outside,’ is ‘grown together’ with us, why he speaks of it as a nature (phusis), and why he insists that thought is a motion (kinêsis). We show how these striking claims can be understood against the broader background of Theophrastus’ natural philosophy. (shrink)

Aristotle’s most fundamental distinction between changes and other activities is not that ofMetaphysicsΘ.6, between end-exclusive and end-inclusive activities, but one implicit inPhysics3.1’s definition of change, between the activity of something incomplete and the activity of something complete. Notably, only the latter distinction can account for Aristotle’s view, inPhysics3.3, that ‘agency’—effecting change in something, e.g. teaching—does not qualify strictly as a change. This distinction informsDe Anima2.5 and imparts unity to Aristotle’s extended treatment of change inPhysics3.1-3.

Name der Zeitschrift: Rhizomata Jahrgang: 5 Heft: 2 Seiten: 177-209.

This chapter contains sections titled: Phantasia Thought Notes Bibliography.

In "De anima" 3.5, Aristotle argues for the existence of a second intellect, the so-called "Agent Intellect." The logical structure of his argument turns on a distinction between different types of soul, rather than different faculties within a given soul; and the attributes he assigns to the second species make it clear that his concern here -- as at the climax of his other great works, such as the "Metaphysics," the "Nicomachean" and the "Eudemian Ethics" -- is the difference between (...) the human and the divine. If this is right, we needn't go on a wild goose chase trying to invent a role for the so-called Agent Intellect to play. God moves our intellects as he moves the heavenly spheres, "as a beloved": he constitutes the complete actualization towards which all of our intellectual striving is directed. Aristotle regards such final causation as an efficient cause, but not in a way that would make it part of what we would call the causal processes or mechanisms of human psychology. But, he would insist, it is essential for appreciating who we are and what our place is in the world. (shrink)

This book deals with some Peripatetic philosophers of the Hellenistic age who were direct and indirect pupils of Aristotle. The main focus of the book is Aristotle's school in the Hellenistic period, a subject not particularly explored by the scholars. Three main issues are addressed in the chapters of the book: the problem of knowledge, the question of time, and the doctrine of the soul. More specifically the topics addressed are: the problem of sense-perception and the method of multiple explanations (...) in the field of meteorology in Aristotle, Theophrastus and Epicurus, the epistemology of Strato, the notion of time in Eudemus and Strato, the conception of sleep in Clearchus, the doctrine of divination in Cratippus. Finally, the Appendix examines the probable influence of the physics of Strato on the medicine of Asclepiades of Bithynia. These themes are investigated by comparing the positions of the Peripatetics with Aristotle's philosophy, but above all by contextualising the doctrines of the Peripatetics within the broader framework of Hellenistic philosophies. (shrink)

Ackrill’s Problem is a tension between Aristotle’s alleged view that the matter of a living being is a body that is essentially ensouled, and his view that the matter of a substance preexists its generation. Most interpreters solve the tension by claiming that the subject of substantial generation is not the organic body of the living being, but its non-organic matter. I defend a different solution by showing that the embryological theory ofOn the Generation of Animalsimplies that the organic body (...) of a living being already exists before acquiring the soul in actuality. (shrink)

Der heute verlorene Kommentar von Alexander aus Aphrodisias zur Physik des Aristoteles ist eines der wichtigsten Werke der Antike: beeinflusste er doch als Quelle sowohl die griechischen Kommentatoren des Aristoteles als auch - vermittelt durch die Araber - die Philosophie des Mittelalters. Die in dieser Ausgabe pr+sentierte Erstedition und Untersuchung der nahezu 700 byzantinischen Scholien, die erst j8ngst entdeckt wurden, erlauben eine genauere Rekonstruktion der physikalischen Lehren Alexanders und tragen zugleich zum besseren Verst+ndnis der Geschichte des Aristotelismus und der vorklassischen (...) Physik bei. (shrink)

"Aristotle versus Plato. For a long time that is the angle from which the tale has been told, in textbooks on the history of philosophy and to university students. Aristotle's philosophy, so the story goes, was au fond in opposition to Plato's. But it was not always thus."--from the Introduction In a wide-ranging book likely to cause controversy, Lloyd P. Gerson sets out the case for the "harmony" of Platonism and Aristotelianism, the standard view in late antiquity. He aims to (...) show that the twentieth-century view that Aristotle started out as a Platonist and ended up as an anti-Platonist is seriously flawed. Gerson examines the Neoplatonic commentators on Aristotle based on their principle of harmony. In considering ancient studies of Aristotle's Categories, Physics, De Anima, Metaphysics, and Nicomachean Ethics, the author shows how the principle of harmony allows us to understand numerous texts that otherwise appear intractable. Gerson also explains how these "esoteric" treatises can be seen not to conflict with the early "exoteric" and admittedly Platonic dialogues of Aristotle. Aristotle and Other Platonists concludes with an assessment of some of the philosophical results of acknowledging harmony. (shrink)

I offer a new interpretation of the passages where Aristotle maintains that intellectual activity employs φαντάσµατα (images). In theoretical understanding of mathematical and natural beings, we usually need to consciously employ appropriate φαντάσµατα in order to grasp explanatory connections. Aristotle does not, however, commit himself to thinking that images are required for exercising all theoretical understanding: understanding immaterial things, in particular, may not involve φαντάσµατα. Thus the connection that Aristotle makes between images and understanding does not rule out the possibility (...) that human intellectual activity could occur apart from the body. (shrink)

The article reconstructs a late ancient debate concerning a dilemma raised by Aristotle’s De anima: How can an impassive soul account for perceiving qua being affected by perceptual objects? It is argued that Alexander and Themistius developed radically different approaches which can be better understood within a larger context of the dialogue between Aristotelianism and Platonism. The debate is shown to be instructive in underlining difficulties inherent in Aristotle’s account.

F. Brentano. Franz Brentano ARISTOTELES LEHRE VOM URSPRUNG DES_ MENSOHLIOI-IEN GEISTES VON FRANZ BREN'I'ANO. Aristoteles Lehre vom Ursprung des menschlichen Geistes. Front Cover.

Many fragments from Theophrastus on perception are preserved by the late Neoplatonist, Priscian of Lydia. After preliminary source criticism concerning how to identify the fragments, I turn to Theophrastus’ discussion of perceiving and perceptual awareness. While he clearly rejects literalism, he also does not embrace “spiritualism”: he argues instead that we receive the defining proportions of perceptible qualities in the sense organ, though in different contraries than in the perceptible (thereby avoiding literalism). If Priscian’s report is faithful, Theophrastus also accepts (...) a moderate capacity reading of De anima III.2, locating awareness in a central monitoring sense, common to the individual modalities; and this has further implications for the unity of consciousness. Theophrastus’ method, though aporetic in form, is nonetheless a constructive engagement with the same texts of Aristotle’s we have ourselves, in the service of a joint research program in psychology that he shared with his colleague and former teacher. (shrink)

This paper argues that focusing on Aristotle’s theory of generation as primarily ‘hylomorphic’ can lead to difficulties. This is especially evident when interpreting the association between the male and sentient soul at GA 2.5. If the focus is on the male’s contribution as form and the female’s as matter, then soul becomes divided into nutritive from female and sentient from male which makes little sense in Aristotle’s biological ontology. In contrast, by seeing Aristotle’s theory as ‘archēkinētic’, a process initiated by (...) the male, the development of nutritive and sentient capacities emerges as intertwined, neither capacity originating in only one sex. (shrink)