Aristotle's De anima : a guide /
Aristotle's De Anima explores the concept of the psuchê, a distinctively Greek concept that overlaps in certain respects with our modern notions of the mind or the soul, but that applies to plants and non-human animals, as well as to human beings. In the De Anima, Aristotle develops an innovati...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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New York :
Oxford University Press,
[2025].
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| Series: | Oxford guides to philosophy.
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| Subjects: |
| Summary: | Aristotle's De Anima explores the concept of the psuchê, a distinctively Greek concept that overlaps in certain respects with our modern notions of the mind or the soul, but that applies to plants and non-human animals, as well as to human beings. In the De Anima, Aristotle develops an innovative and challenging account of the relation between the psuchê and the body, before going on to offer thought-provoking accounts of the different capacities of the psuchê, starting with nutrition and reproduction. In addition to discussing perception in general, Aristotle explores the five individual sense modalities in detail, as well as perceptual imagination. He then goes on to discuss the intellectual capacities that he takes to be distinctive of human beings (including the famous discussion of the "agent intellect" in III.5) before going on to give a sophisticated account of how desire leads to action. This situates the De Anima in the context of ancient Greek philosophy, as well as relating it to Aristotle's corpus as a whole. Each chapter is organized around focus readings from the De Anima and elsewhere in Aristotle's writings (as well as some readings from Plato's Phaedo and Theaetetus). The author develops an historically-informed account of Aristotle's arguments in the De Anima that draws connections with contemporary philosophy of mind as appropriate. The reader is introduced to some of the key topics and controversies in modern Aristotle scholarship, as well as to the insights of the ancient and medieval commentators. |
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| Physical Description: | xii, 327 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages [307]-319) and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780197624685 0197624685 9780197624678 0197624677 |