De Anima [on The Soul]
(Aristotle)
The name of Aristotle is probably the first one that comes in the very first lines of a quite big list when we consider who the greatest philosophers actually were. In the case of Aristotle we have the rare occasion of a philosopher being respected by any other philosopher that ever lived in the history of western philosophy. No matter the convergence or not of individual philosophers to his work, no one has neglected his thories, but on the contrary they felt that a proper analysis of his intellectual property must first be made, in order for them to proceed to a some kind of critique against him. De anima (on the soul) is a classic philosophical text, considering that all Aristotelian texts are classic in a way, but not a classic one in comparison with the more straight-forward ones like Politics or ethics. As the title already implied, this book is about an analysis of what we traditionaly and rather arbitrarliy call 'soul'. Aristotle argues that the existence of the so called 'soul(psyche)' is responsible for the distinction between animate and non-animate beings. Moreover this abstract 'soul' is said to be divided in hierarchical faculties beginning with nutrition and ending with intellect. For example humans, even though they belong to the same big class of animates, along wih animals and plants, however they are distinguished by the latter due to their possession of intellect and sensation and by the former by the possession of intellect alone. Aristotle discusses each of the five senses and gives deep insights about their properties. Extremely interesting are also the parts in the book where Aristotle discusses imagination, as a mediate between sensation and intellect as well as his teleologian views on the nature of things, the endelechy, that is the final cause, that every object has innately hidden. It isn't coincidence that this book attracted christian theologicians, resulting in the so called neo-platonic movement in the west. Intellectually stimulating!
Resumos Relacionados
- De Anima [on The Soul] (book One Of Three)
- Nichomachean Ethics
- On Dreams
- The Story Of Philosophy
- "eight Chapters" By The Rambam
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