180035 SE Aristoteles De anima (2019S)

Aristotle in his De anima or "On the Soul" outlines his theory of what the soul is and how it connects with the body. This is a mature work of Aristotle, which can be seen as an introduction to his biological and zoological treatises, to the extent that those deal with living, that is, ensouled organisms. The fundament for such biological and zoological researches is of course a theory about the soul. The De anima consists of three books. In the first one Aristotle presents and criticises the theory of his predecessors and especially their methodologies. Books 2 and 3 contain Aristotle's one views on what the soul is and what its capacities or faculties are, such as those of desire, perception and thinking. For Aristotle the soul is a kind of physis, i.e. nature, which accounts for the life of a living being (De an. II 4, 415b18-12). Aristotle considers the soul as a cause and a principle of a living body and as the "essence of the ensouled body". The soul is actually the kind of structure that enables the body to be living. This means though that the soul requires a certain, proper, kind of body, which she can enliven, namely a body with certain organs, so that this body becomes the body of a dog or man. Such a body, however, does not exist of itself, but is shaped and determined by the soul, in the same sense that the eyes are shaped by the sight (De an. 412b17-23). The sight is what makes the eyes what they are; similarly the soul is the essence of the living being. In the seminar we will focus mainly on book 2 of De anima.