On the Soul by Aristotle

Description

On the Soul is a book by Aristotle, first written c. 350 BCE. In this compact but deep treatise (commonly known by its Latin title De Anima), Aristotle investigates what it is to be a living thing by asking what the soul (psyche) is and what it does. Rejecting the notion of the soul as a separable ghostly substance, he argues instead that the soul is the form — the organizing principle — of a body: it is what makes an organism alive. Through close, analytical chapters on nutrition, perception, sensation, memory and intellect, Aristotle lays out a practical, observational approach to questions that today fall under philosophy of mind, cognitive theory and the history of psychology. The work’s lasting influence stretches from medieval scholasticism and Islamic philosophy through Renaissance natural science to modern debates about consciousness and embodiment. Key Aristotelian ideas in On the Soul — notably hylomorphism (the unity of form and matter), the distinction of faculties, and a careful account of perception and intellect — provided the conceptual tools later thinkers used to shape metaphysics, ethics and early biological theory. For readers interested in classical metaphysics, Aristotelian psychology, or the origins of Western ideas about soul and mind, On the Soul remains an essential and spirited inquiry into what life and thought amount to. This is a 1931 translation by J. A. Smith.

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