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de Anima (Great Books in Philosophy)

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Aristotle's short but profoundly influential work, De Anima, is set within a
rich supporting text authored by Hugh Lawson-Tancred, the Penquin edition's
translator and editor, that absorbs almost three-fourths of this volume.
Besides his lengthy introduction, the editor provides a useful glossary
of translations, summaries before each chapter, copious endnotes, and a
short bibliography, but no index.

Unlike more widely read, fully formed, straightforward books by Aristotle,
such as Politics and Ethics, De Anima asserts cryptic ideas and advances
viewpoints that seem quite strange today. The editor's Introduction addresses
such potential impediments for the Aristotelean neophyte and amplifies
problematic issues of interest to philosophers of any acquaintance. Aristotle's
subject is a general "principle of life" intrinsic to all plants and animals,
not any contemporary notion about the soul (psyche) suggested by its English
title, On The Soul. Aristotle's soul includes his psychology and topics such
as sensation and thought. Lawson-Tancred argues that Aristotle is indifferent
to the issue preoccupying epistomologists and psychologists during recent
centuries, Descartes's division of subjectivity into the body and mind. He claims
that Aristotle is concerned with general features of life, not with purely human
issues like consciousness. In discounting consciousness, Aristotle concurs with
anti-Cartesian positivists, but Lawson-Tancred argues that when Aristotle
says the soul is substance, he really means it, contradicting physicalist
contentions that it is an epiphenomenon or a list of special attributes.
Aristotle's soul is substance, but Aristotle rejects reducing the soul's
properties to the body's material.

Teleology is explanation implicating final causes, e.g., things fulfill
purposes for which they were created. Scientists reject creation and
ultimate purpose, and censure Aristotle for his teleological explanations.
Regarding the soul, however, Aristotle suggests that to understand biological
phenomena, the arrangement of material and its relationship to functions it
performs is key. Recent rethinking about Aristotle's functionalism has
reinvigorated his status in modern biology. Theologians generally view Aristotle's
work favorably, especially his emphasis on built-in purpose and final causes.
Lawson-Tancred recounts Aristotle's powerful influence on intellectual history
from his immediate successors, to assimilation in the neo-Platonic West, through
incorporation by Islamic and Christian theologians, connections that made
De Anima so important for over 2000 years.

Lawson-Tancred also discusses Aristotle's personal history and intellectual
development; his mentor, Plato, and their mutual influence; ideas of
other philosophers that Aristotle encountered, and De Anima in context
of his other works. He concludes by criticizing the interpretations of

Aristotle by the philosophers Brentano and Wilkes. Lawson-Tancred helps
the reader to understand many ideas, but two essential concepts Aristotle
developed elsewhere are prerequisite to understanding De Anima:
entelechy (entelecheia) and substance (ousia). Substance or essence is the
fundamental reality of existence. Form, Matter, and their composite
are types of substances. Matter is the inanimate, elemental substrate of
which things are composed, e.g., earth made into a statue. Form is the
structure and function outlined by a formula (logos), e.g., a statue artfully
shaped to resemble a woman. Things exist either in actuality (putting
to use) or potentiality (unexploited capacity). Form is actuality;
Matter is potentiality. Aristotle's theory is that Form combines with
Matter following the the Form's plan to actualize potential. Entelechy
is the possession of this intrinsic goal that is realized when Form and
Matter combine. Thus, Aristotle's teleological approach is called "Entelechism."
Aristotle uses entelechy repeatedly to describe the soul, as the following
summary of De Anima shows.

In Book I, Aristotle describes his subject: the soul, "the first
principle of living things," and considers its relation to intellect,
emotion, etc. He comments on other philosophers's works: whether
the soul is material, and what kind; its characteristic features
(it moves, senses, and lacks body); how it produces bodily movement;
etc. He criticizes theories that the soul is quantity or harmony or
participates in the whole universe. He concludes that the soul lacks
motion and is not material nor made of elements. Instead, the soul
comprises several faculties: e.g., cognition, appetite.

Book II begins with an important formulation: the soul is the "form of
the living body which potentially has life" (the organism's first actuality).
Having a soul distinguishes living from inanimate objects. The soul's
nutritive faculty is essential for all organisms, but animals have the
faculty of sensation, separating them from plants. Thus begins a hierarchy
of faculties from nutrition to intellect. In sensation, the sense organ
and sense-object, like the soul and body, participate in the Form/Matter
relationship. The sense organ receives the object's Form, not its matter,
in Aristotle's words, "as the wax takes the sign from the ring without the
iron and gold." He discusses each of the five senses, and makes a famous
distinction among perceptual elements (special, common, incidental).

Aristotle concludes discussing sensation in Book III by proposing functions
of the perceptive faculty that integrate individual senses. Imagination,
a faculty producing imagery, mediates between sensation and intellect.
Aristotle's remarks about intellect are among his most renowned, fecund,
and difficult. He describes the intellectual faculty, which includes thinking

and supposition, with the same physiological approach of his sensory theory.
The organ of thought receives the Form of the thought-object to realize thinking.
He calls the intellect a repository of Forms and distinguishes the active from
the passive intellect, providing inspiration for Thomas Aquinas's psychology.
Aristotle concludes with a discussion of motivation, i.e., what puts the
organism into action.

No other work contains a psychological theory like that presented in De Anima,
excepting Aquinas's derivative. Its resemblance to attribute (behaviorist)
theories of the mind cannot obscure Aristotle's radically different foundation.
His Form-Matter and Actuality-Potentiality concepts are not explanatory, only
a framework for inquiry. Its relevance, as Lawson-Tancred notes, to modern
psychology depends upon identifying an empirical approach to Aristotle's Form.
Aristotle's proposal that life has, or is, a principle provides an alternative
point of departure for scientists who find contemporary materialist dogma lacking
direction. De Anima, one of the most important books ever written, and long
neglected by scientific psychology, still puts life in an eternal debate.

This version of Aristotle's De Anima is the criticial edition by W.D. Ross. It does not contain an English translation nor does it contain Ross's commentary on the text, which is available in a larger edition. Nonetheless, it contains all the critical notes concerning textual differences of the manuscripts used by Ross. This text will be beneficial for anyone interested in working through Aristotle's De Anima in the original Greek, whether you are a serious student of Greek or of philosophy. Finally, this edition has a handy index to help you locate where Aristotle uses many of the Greek words in the text.

The popular concept of the existence of a "soul," a person's personality that is separate from the body, which survives the death of the body and lives on for eternity, while accepted as axiomatic by Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, is not in the Hebrew Bible. The idea was taken from ancient pagan cultures and the Greek philosopher Plato was probably the person who was most influential in influencing the popular thinking and helped mold this Christian, Jewish, and Islamic belief. However, not all people of these faiths accepted the idea, and some religious thinkers accepted the teaching of Aristotle.

The popular view about the afterlife is enshrined in the post-Hebrew Bible holy books. The New Testament speaks about Jesus going to heaven. The Quran proclaims "I swear by the day of resurrection." Jews recite a prayer three times daily, "who caused the dead to come to life."

This is the popular view. What does Aristotle say?

Aristotle's teacher, the famous Greek philosopher Plato (428 or 427-348 or 347 BCE), like many people today, believed that the soul exists independent of the body. It the real me that is clothed in the body, which is not me. It may or may not have existed from the beginning of time, but it will survive for all eternity with the same personality it had when it was joined to the body.

In his The Apology, Plato describes his teacher discussing death just before he died. Socrates said that there are two possibilities: either there is nothingness after death or "as people say, a change and migration of the soul from this to another place." He seems to believe the second because he also says that people "must bear in mind this one truth, that no evil can come to a good man either in life or after death, and God does not neglect him." However there is no certainty that Plato accepted the second possibility because, as Plato wrote in his Republic it is necessary to teach the masses ideas that are false, called "essential truths," in order to control them from acting improperly and to weaken their worries.

Aristotle (384-322 BCE) rejected Plato's notion that the soul is an independent body. Aristotle contended that the "soul" is the life force that makes it possible for something to live and think. It is "the cause or source of the living body." It is "the essential whatness of the body." In humans, the soul is comprised of five parts or systems: the nutritive system, the appetitive (desires and passions), senses, locomotion, and thinking. Since they are alive, plants and animals also have souls, but not all five parts. Plants, according to Aristotle, only have the nutritive part of the soul. Animals have four of the five and lack thinking.

Aristotle stated that the "mind" or "intellect" cannot be destroyed and it will continue to exist after the body dies. Old people have difficulty thinking not because the mind has deteriorated, but because the vehicle, the body, holding the mind has deteriorated. This is similar to what happens when a person is drunk or sick; the body does not let the mind work.

He agreed that the intellect does survive the death of the body. However, it appears that he felt that this surviving intellect knows nothing about its prior existence.

I read these works for a graduate seminar on Aristotle.

Soul- De Anima Latin for Greek word Psuche=Life. It is a Phenomenology of Life. Living things are Aristotle¡¦s primary interest. Renee Descartes says thinking is only aspect of soul, not life. For Descartes the soul is the mind. Aristotle classifies features of living things. A soul can¡¦t be a body, (like a corpse). Psuche=life is a living form of the body, the phenomenon of life. Capacity to live is what he means. Ergon=function or work, thus when he talks about soul it is a body¡¦s function. Thus, a corpse is a deactivated body. Dunamis=capacity, Energia= actuality, thus both words are active words and can be seen as ¡§activating capacity.¡¨ Like a builder while building a house, past potential but not actual until the house is complete.
Entelecheia=¡¨living things have their ends inside them.¡¨ A living being has an end in itself.

What is the soul? Psuche= soul is being working toward ends of a self-moving body having the capacity to live. This is another way of talking about desire (like an animal that is hungry). Desire-animals have this as we do. Orexis=desire. The phenomenology of desire is to be motivated towards something that is lacking at the time, hunger, etc. Pleasure and pain.
Desire and action there are 3 kinds of desire.

1. Appetite like hunger and sex.
2. Emotion-like love not on crude level as appetite.
3. Wish-desire of the mind, (I want a good job).

All three strive towards something that is lacking. ¡§Desire is movement of the soul.¡¨ Human life is a set of desires. Human desires are more complicated. Desires clash like dieting and appetite.

¡§All humans desire to know.¡¨ This is the first line of the Metaphysics. Knowledge examined in terms of distinction between matter and form, perception has to do with intelligible form. Perception takes in visible form of something without the matter. Like imagination, an animal and human can do this. All knowledge starts with perception thus memory. Ultimate knowledge is intelligible form from visible form but mind is also using abstractions, this is a human capacity only. Humans use language to do this. Animals have image of a cat, word ¡§cat¡¨ is an abstraction for us. True knowledge organizes language.

Seing<³being seen. Two beings, seer and seen, this is act of vision it is only one actuality and two potentialities. In effect, Aristotle is saying that the capacity to see can only be actualized by seeing something. However, he goes the other way as well; something seeable only actualizes its seeability by being seen. One actuality, two potentials, the potential to see, the potential to be seen. In the modern world since Descartes, it is spoken as two actualities, the mind, and the outside world and there is a split between the two, two actualities, the mind as a separate thing and the object as a separate thing being seen. This is the source of the classic problem of skepticism. When there is seeing obviously you have two beings, the seer and the seen, but the act of vision is one actuality. Aristotle does not have this skeptical problem because he seems to stipulate this idea of single actuality and the whole point of the capacity to know is meant to hook up with things known. The whole point of knowable things is to be known by knower¡¦s, that is what he means by one actuality, thus there is no split between the mind and the world. There is no purely inside and outside. It isn¡¦t that minds are in here and the world is out there, and we might wonder about how they hook up. The nature of things and the nature of the mind are meant to hook up. Thus, Aristotle is not a radical skeptic like Descartes or Hume. Act of seeing the desk is joint actuality of seer and seen.

Actual hearing and actual sounding occur at the same time. Berkeley¡¦s famous question¡K¡¨If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? For Berkeley, to be is to be perceived. Aristotle answers Berkeley¡¦s question that it does make a sound, but you have to have the capacity to hear, it is a joint venture. The mind and the world are not separated like for Descartes. Aristotle doesn¡¦t buy the idea that ¡§everything in my mind can be false¡¨ like the skeptics argue, Aristotle would say this is impossible. Getting things true and false are part of what the mind has to do, but the possibility that the whole mental realm could be put into question is impossible. Thus, he doesn¡¦t have to answer the question put to skeptics. ¡§If you are right that there is a radical doubt about the possibility of our knowledge hooking up with reality, why would the human situation ever come to pass in this way that it is possible that we could be totally wrong.¡¨ The skeptics answer we are not sure that we are wrong, they are saying we can¡¦t be sure that we are right. If that were the case then Aristotle can say, well is this a recipe for the human condition? One can be skeptical about this or that, but not about everything.

Aristotle moves from perception to thought. The thinking of the world and world to be thought is actualization. Nous=highest capacity of intellect for Aristotle. Mind is potential and until it thinks isn¡¦t actualization. The implication of this the world wants to be known according to Aristotle. The world also activates our desire. One actualization of two potentialities. Taking in form without matter that is what knowledge is. A knowing soul cannot be separation from the body. The mind has built in capacity to understand for Aristotle, no actual knowledge until intellect engages with objects. ¡§Actually thinking mind is the thing that it thinks. In this respect the soul is all existing things.¡¨ Soul is capacity to think the world in the passage.

I recommend Aristotle¡¦s works to anyone interested in obtaining a classical education, and those interested in philosophy. Aristotle is one of the most important philosophers and the standard that all others must be judged by.

I received the product at the tail end of the allotted shipping time, but the product did arrive in pristine order.

How will Virtual Reality and other new technology change you, the way that you feel, and the way that you react to your surroundings? One cannot even begin to answer this important question without first reading De Anima.
This masterpiece reflects on the five senses, their relation to each other, and their relation to the 'common sense' (soul) that binds them. De Anima is a valuable insight into the fundamental mechanism that governs the way that we learn, act, and live.

New technology is a sword that cuts both ways. Will we become inactive, lose our passion or even our humanity? Written centuries ago, this book will not give you any answers on a platter nor will the word Virtual Reality even be mentioned. This book is, however, filled with timeless wisdom that has survived the ages. De Anima will prove to be an indispensible tool for those who have a sincere desire to study the way that new technology is changing our senses and how these changes may affect the future of our noble race.

This book is something that everyone who is interested in truth and beauty should read. Every other philisophical writing is a mere foot note to this book and this particular edition is so accurate that it doesn't leave you wondering why.