De Anima (Penguin Classics) [Paperback]

Aristotle (Author), Hugh Lawson-Tancred (Translator)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0140444718 | ISBN-13: 978-0140444711 | Publication Date: June 2, 1987

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.

Editorial Reviews

Language Notes

Text: English, Greek (translation)

About the Author

Aristotle was born in 384BC. For twenty years he studied at Athens at the Academy of Plato, on whose death in 347 he left, and some time later became tutor to Alexander the Great. On Alexander's succession to the throne of Macedonia in 336, Aristotle returned to Athens and established his school and research institute, the Lyceum. After Alexander's death he was driven out of Athens and feld to Chalcis in Euboea where he died in 322. His writings profoundly affected the whole course of ancient and medieval philosophy. HUGH LAWSON-TANCRED was born in 1955 and educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford. He is a Departmental Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at Birkbeck College in the University of London. He has published extensively on Aristotle and Plato and is currently engaged in research in computational linguistics. He translates widely from the Slavonic and Scandinavian languages. His translations of Aristotle's The Art of Rhetoric and De Anima are also published in Penguin Classics. He is married with a daughter and two sons and lives in North London and Somerset.

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Classics (June 2, 1987)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140444718
• ISBN-13: 978-0140444711
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #227,176 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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32 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Aristotle's Psychology in a Broader Context, August 9, 2003

By 

Joseph C. Hager, Ph.D. - See all my reviews

This review is from: De Anima (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)

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.

21 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Aristotle's De Anima, July 23, 2001

By 

Chad E Wiener (Athens, GA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: De Anima (Oxford Classical Texts) (Hardcover)

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.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A very important discussion on the soul, April 4, 2010

By 

Israel Drazin (Boca Raton, Florida) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: De Anima (Paperback)

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.