Alexander Aphrodisiensis, "De anima libri mantissa"
Alexander Aphrodisiensis,

Author: Alexander Aphrodisiensis

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2014-09-05

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 3110978997

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R. W. Sharples provides a new edition, with introduction and commentary in English, of the Greek text. The Mantissa is a collection of short discussions, transmitted as a supplement to the treatise On the Soul by the Aristotelian commentator Alexander of Aphrodisias (c.200 AD). The collection includes discussion of a range of topics, among them the nature of soul and intellect, theories of how seeing takes place, issues in ethics, and the nature of fate. The text is based upon a new collation of the principal manuscript, the ninth century Venetus Marcianus graecus 258, and the apparatus corrects Bruns' misreportings of the principal manuscript and of the others that he used. Account has also been taken of the medieval Arabic and Latin versions of some of the sections which circulated independently, notably On Intellect which had a substantial influence on medieval philosophy. The introduction is chiefly concerned with the manuscripts and the relation between them. The commentary is based on the notes to the editor's English translation of the work (London: Duckworth and Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004); however, the commentary also takes into account more recent work on the collection by various scholars.

Alexander of Aphrodisias: On the Soul
Alexander of Aphrodisias: On the Soul

Author:

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2014-04-22

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1472501721

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Around 200 AD, the greatest defender and interpreter of Aristotle within his school, Alexander of Aphrodisias, composed his own book On the Soul, partly following the pattern of Aristotle's. In the first half, translated in this volume, he discusses the soul as the form of the body, and the idea of parts or powers that constitute the soul of living things, including the two lowest powers: nutrition and perception. In the second half, translated in Part II, he discusses perception, representation, desire, understanding and - a notion emphasised by the Stoics - the governing part of the soul. He takes the soul to consist of these powers, which supervene on the mixture of the body's elemental ingredients, just as inanimate powers like buoyancy or lightness can supervene on other qualities. They are new, emergent causal powers of the living thing, which do not belong to the constituent ingredients of the body in themselves. Through his notion of emergence, he seeks to steer between the Platonic dualism of soul and body and the extreme materialism of his Stoic rivals. This volume contains the first English translation of the work, as well as a detailed introduction, extensive explanatory notes and a bibliography.

The Renaissance of Plotinus
The Renaissance of Plotinus

Author: Anna Corrias

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-06-09

Total Pages: 152

ISBN-13: 1000080102

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Plotinus (204/5–270 C.E.) is a central figure in the history of Western philosophy. However, during the Middle Ages he was almost unknown. None of the treatises constituting his Enneads were translated, and ancient translations were lost. Although scholars had indirect access to his philosophy through the works of Proclus, St. Augustine, and Macrobius, among others, it was not until 1492 with the publication of the first Latin translation of the Enneads by the humanist philosopher Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) that Plotinus was reborn to the Western world. Ficino’s translation was accompanied by a long commentary in which he examined the close relationship between metaphysics and anthropology that informed Plotinus’s philosophy. Focusing on Ficino’s interpretation of Plotinus’s view of the soul and of human nature, this book excavates a fundamental chapter in the history of Platonic scholarship, one which was to inform later readings of the Enneads up until the nineteenth century. It will appeal to scholars and students interested in the history of Western philosophy, intellectual history, and book history.

Nutrition and Nutritive Soul in Aristotle and Aristotelianism
Nutrition and Nutritive Soul in Aristotle and Aristotelianism

Author: Giouli Korobili

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2020-12-07

Total Pages: 494

ISBN-13: 311069056X

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This volume is a detailed study of the concept of the nutritive capacity of the soul and its actual manifestation in living bodies (plants, animals, humans) in Aristotle and Aristotelianism. Aristotle’s innovative analysis of the nutritive faculty has laid the intellectual foundation for the increasing appreciation of nutrition as a prerequisite for the maintenance of life and health that can be observed in the history of Greek thought. According to Aristotle, apart from nutrition, the nutritive part of the soul is also responsible for or interacts with many other bodily functions or mechanisms, such as digestion, growth, reproduction, sleep, and the innate heat. After Aristotle, these concepts were used and further developed by a great number of Peripatetic philosophers, commentators on Aristotle and Arabic thinkers until early modern times. This volume is the first of its kind to provide an in-depth survey of the development of this rather philosophical concept from Aristotle to early modern thinkers. It is of key interest to scholars working on classical, medieval and early modern psycho-physiological accounts of living things, historians and philosophers of science, biologists with interests in the history of science, and, generally, students of the history of philosophy and science.

Alexander of Aphrodisias and his Doctrine of the Soul
Alexander of Aphrodisias and his Doctrine of the Soul

Author: Eckhard Keßler

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2011-06-22

Total Pages: 108

ISBN-13: 9004210199

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This book describes the doctrine and impact of Alexander of Aphrodisias, the second-century commentator on Aristotle, through the centuries and up to his sixteenth-century role as the clandestine prompter of a new philosophy of nature. In the millennium after his death, Alexander first served the Neo-Platonic schools as their authority on Aristotle, and in the Arabic centuries subsequently served as Averroes’ exemplary exponent of the doctrine of the mortality of the soul. For this reason, the Latin Scholastics deemed his work unworthy of being translated. This changed only in the late Middle Ages, when Alexander emerged as the only Aristotelian alternative to Averroes. When in 1495 his account of Aristotle’s psychology was translated and published, his principles of a natural philosophy, which were exempt from metaphysics and based on sense perception, eventually became accessible. The prompt reception and widespread endorsement of Alexander’s teaching testify to his impact throughout the sixteenth century. Originally published as Volume XVI, No. 1 (2011) of Brill's journal Early Science and Medicine.

On Aristotle's "On the Soul 1.3-5"
On Aristotle's

Author: John Philoponus

Publisher:

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13:

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"This text by Philoponus rejects accounts of soul or, as we would say, of mind, that define it as being in motion or in cognitive or physical terms. Chapter 3 considers Aristotle's attack on the idea that the soul is in motion. This was an attack partly on his teacher, Plato, since Plato defines the soul as self-moving. Philoponus agrees with Aristotle's attack, but, probably following Ammonius, he takes Plato's apparently physicalist account of the soul in the Timeus as symbolic; Aristotle's criticism only concerns literalists. What we would call the mind-body relation is the subject of Chapter 4. In chapter 5, Philoponus endorses Aristotle's rejection of the idea that the soul is particles and of Empedocles's idea that the soul must be made of all four elements in order to know what is made of the same elements."--BOOK JACKET.

Subject, Definition, Activity
Subject, Definition, Activity

Author: Tommaso Alpina

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2021-02-08

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 3110706849

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This book offers for the first time a comprehensive study of the reception and reworking of the Peripatetic theory of the soul in the Kitāb al-Nafs (Book of the Soul) by Avicenna (d. 1037). This study seeks to frame Avicenna’s science of the soul (or psychology) by focusing on three key concepts: subject, definition, and activity. The examination of these concepts will disclose the twofold consideration of the soul in Avicenna’s psychology. Besides the ‘general approach’ to the soul of sublunary living beings, which is the formal principle of the body, Avicenna’s psychology also exhibits a ‘specific orientation’ towards the soul in itself, i.e. the human rational soul that, considered in isolation from the body, is a self-subsistent substance, identical with the theoretical intellect and capable of surviving severance from the body. These two investigations demonstrate the coexistence in Avicenna’s psychology of a more specific and less physical science (psychologia specialis) within a more general and overall physical one (psychologia generalis).

Peripatetic Philosophy, 200 BC to AD 200
Peripatetic Philosophy, 200 BC to AD 200

Author: R. W. Sharples

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2010-10-14

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 1139491520

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This book provides a collection of sources, many of them fragmentary and previously scattered and hard to access, for the development of Peripatetic philosophy in the later Hellenistic period and the early Roman Empire. It also supplies the background against which the first commentator on Aristotle from whom extensive material survives, Alexander of Aphrodisias (fl. c. AD 200), developed his interpretations which continue to be influential even today. Many of the passages are here translated into English for the first time, including the whole of the summary of Peripatetic ethics attributed to 'Arius Didymus'.

Plotinus the Platonist
Plotinus the Platonist

Author: David J. Yount

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2014-10-23

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 1472575237

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In this insightful new book David J. Yount argues, against received wisdom, that there are no essential differences between the metaphysics of Plato and Plotinus. Yount covers the core principles of Plotinian thought: The One or Good, Intellect, and All-Soul (the Three Hypostases), Beauty, God(s), Forms, Emanation, Matter, and Evil. After addressing the interpretive issues that surround the authenticity of Plato's works, Plotinus: The Platonist deftly argues against the commonly held view that Plotinus is best interpreted as a Neo-Platonist, proposing he should be thought of as a Platonist proper. Yount presents thorough explanations and quotations from the works of each classical philosopher to demonstrate his thesis, concluding comprehensively that Plato and Plotinus do not essentially differ on their metaphysical conceptions. This is an ideal text for Plato and Plotinus scholars and academics, and excellent supplementary reading for upper-level undergraduates students and postgraduate students of ancient philosophy.