On the Soul

De anima (Latin, Greek Περὶ Ψυχῆς Peri Psyche, " On the Soul ") is a font of Aristotle. It treats the soul as the one entity that causes a natural body, the predicate "alive " can be attributed. The font consists of three books. It is the first known treatise of the ancient world, specifically the soul on the subject. Be addressed, among other issues of epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophical psychology and the theory of action.

Content

Introduction emphasizes Aristotle in the first book, that it belonged to " the most difficult " to obtain reliable knowledge of the soul, but this is a worthwhile goal, both because of the high importance of this issue and because of the accuracy of the accessible knowledge. He then formulated questions that he wants to clarify: if the soul be regarded as quality or quantity as a single thing ( a " certain something" ), is; whether it is divisible or indivisible; whether it is simple ( homogeneous) or composed; whether the souls of the different types of creatures need different definitions; whether the soul has its own operations that do not get the whole beings, and therefore can exist independently.

Then Aristotle turns to the earlier philosophers, the pre-Socratics and Plato. He notes that the was "soul" so far as the reason for being alive, for the perception and self-movement of the organisms considered. He describes the views of his predecessors and examines them and on their merits, in which he comes to negative results: neither can the soul as that which moves are themselves defined, yet it moves in a circle, yet she is a harmony, a number or a spatially extensive, composed of the elements object.

Definition of the soul

In the second and third book of Aristotle explains his own theory about the soul. It defines the soul as entelechy (Akt, reality, perfection ) of a natural, " organic " body which potentially has the chance to live. The term "organic" ( Organon, "tool" ) is usually translated as " equipped with organs "; the meaning is more probably, " serving as an instrument ." With the statement that the body has potentially life is meant that it is suitable for Belebtsein; therefore the soul can actually realize its revival. The soul is not a separate entity that exists independently of the body, but its shape. Therefore, it is not separable from the body. It behaves with him as his eyesight to the eye. Thus Aristotle contradicts the view of Plato, according to which the soul plays an independent existence. In line with its teleological approach he sums up the soul as the final cause of the body.

Faculties of the soul

Aristotle distinguishes between various faculties of the soul, including the diet, locomotion, perception, and reason ( nous ). The soul is the life principle of all living things - plants, animals, people. Different souls have different faculties of the soul; after which he classifies living things. Plants have the vegetative soul property which is responsible for the reproduction and metabolism. All animals also have the sensitive assets, the ability to sense perception, though some only have the sense of touch, the only sense that each animal has. Already from the sense of touch results in the differentiation of comforts and disagreeable and so desire, so a sense of life. Most animals can move independently. Man alone has, moreover, as an intellectual asset, the ability to reason. Extensively studied Aristotle the organs and functions of the individual senses.

Epistemology

A necessary condition for the reason that knowledge brings, is the imagination ( phantasia ), whose activity is defined as a movement that is produced by the execution of a sensory perception. There is also the " strut assets " ( orexis ). Thus in man the reason is real and not just possible, that permits the people in appearance and knowledge brings, it requires an active and a passive principle. The passive ( " erleidende " ) or potential (potential) reason ( nous pathētikós, latin possible intellect ) denotes the imagination with regard to its ability to present the mind sensations to mental screening. The active (or active, acting ) reason ( nous poietikos, latin agent intellect ) is then to abstract, able to draw conclusions and form opinions. The passive sense is biologically inherited, the active comes from "outside " into man. The soul and thus the passive reason is transient, it dies with the body. The active reason Aristotle holds for imperishable; but he means no individual immortality of the individual persons.

The shapes that accommodates the intellect, including the abstract mathematical exist for Aristotle only in the sensate objects. You are therefore not in the supposed independent of Plato, the soul immediately accessible world of ideas. Therefore, the thinking takes place only by ideas derived from sense perception. Without sensation there would be no experience and could not understand anything. This basic statement was later in the Latin nihil est in intellectu formulation, quod non prius in sensu famous ( "Nothing is in the intellect that was not previously in sense perception" ). Another famous assertion of Aristotle is that the human mind has no innate knowledge has, but at the beginning of life a blank panel (Latin tabula rasa ) is similar, which can be described with all possible. In this sense we can say that the intellect "all " may be. Himself he can recognize only indirectly, namely, as a side effect of a Erkenntnisakts, which is directed to an external object.

Reception

The Peripatetic Alexander of Aphrodisias reached around 200 AD on the Aristotelian doctrine of the soul, and represented in particular the view that the soul is mortal, what later became the opposition Christian authors brought him. In the 6th century, the Neoplatonist Simplicius wrote a much publicized in the early modern Comment on De anima, in which he tried to bring the teaching of Aristotle with Neoplatonism in compliance.

In the Latin -speaking scholarly world of the Middle Ages De anima was only known by the Latin translation, who prepared Jacob of Venice no later than the middle of the 12th century. The detailed comments together with its integral text of De anima in the Arabic language, the Averroes had written in the 12th century, stood the scholars since the 1230s years in a Latin translation of Michael Scot available. In the now incipient scholasticism De anima was an authoritative textbook in the universities. One of the numerous comments on it wrote 1254/1257 Albertus Magnus, one of the most influential 1267/1268 Thomas Aquinas on the basis of 1266/67 by William of Moerbeke finished translation. Thomas stressed that the agent intellect is not a separate substance, but a faculty of the human soul, the fancy with the possible intellect are one and the same substance. The Thomistic version of the Aristotelian doctrine of the soul sat in the Catholic Church permanently by.

In the Renaissance Aristotelianism, the discussion went on to understanding of De anima. It was conducted under protestant theologians. Martin Luther turned against the scholastic effort to prove a match of philosophical and theological teachings, and emphasized by contrast, that in the Aristotelian doctrine of the soul is mortal.

Editions and translations

Greek original

• Olof Gigon (ed.): Aristotle: From the sky, from the soul of poetry. Artemis, Zurich 1950 ( only translation )
• Gernot Krapinger (ed.): Aristotle: De Anima. On the Soul. Reclam, Stuttgart 2011, ISBN 978-3-15-018602-2 (Greek text with translation )
• William David Ross: Aristotelis De anima. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1956 ( critical edition )
• Horst Seidl (ed.): Aristotle: On the Soul. Meiner, Hamburg 1995, ISBN 3-7873-1381-8 (Greek text according to the critical edition of William Biehl and Otto Apelt with translation and commentary )

Late Antiquity paraphrase in Arabic and Persian tradition

• Rüdiger Arnzen: Aristotle's De Anima. A lost late antique paraphrase in Arabic & Persian tradition. Arabic text plus commentary, source historical studies and glossaries. Brill, Leiden 1998 ( Aristotle Semitico - Latinus, 9) online. (Publication of Diss Bochum 1994).