In this rendering of Aristotle's De Anima, I have tried to produce a version at once accessible to the layman and tolerable to the initiate. However, even if I had discharged this task with unexampled felicity, readers unfamiliar with Aristotle's thought would, if confronted with an unsupported text, have at times been left wondering what was going on.For these readers I have provided a fairly long Introduction,in which I have tried to offer a conspectus of recent discussion of the work. I hope its central themes will have been thrown into perspective, although it goes without saying that I offer the serious student no more than a starting-point to further inquiry.
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For the Presocratic philosophers the soul was the source of movement and sensation, while for Plato it was the seat of being, metaphysically distinct from the body that it was forced temporarily to inhabit. Plato's student Aristotle was determined to test the truth of both these beliefs against the emerging sciences of logic and biology. His examination of the huge variety of living organisms - the enormous range of their behaviour, their powers and their perceptual sophistication - convinced him of the inadequacy both of a materialist reduction and of a Platonic sublimation of the soul. In De Anima, he sought to set out his theory of the soul as the ultimate reality of embodied form and produced both a masterpiece of philosophical insight and a psychology of perennially fascinating subtlety.
Hugh Lawson-Tancred's masterly translation makes De Anima fully accessible to modern readers. In his introduction, he places Aristotle's theories at the heart of contemporary debates on the philosophy of life and being.
FOREWORD
INTRODUCTION
I. Entelechism
II. The Life of Aristotle
III. The Philosophical Background
IV. The Development and Scope of Entelechism
V. Perception, Imagination and Desire
VI. Intellect
VII. Entelechism in the Modern Debate
VIII. Conclusion
IX. The Translation
GLOSSARY
ON THE SOUL
BOOK I
The Traditional Background
Chapter One. The Scope of the Work
Chapter Two. Some Earlier Theories
Chapter Three. Comments on Earlier Views (I)
Chapter Four. Comments on Earlier Views (II)
Chapter Five. General Remarks
BOOK II
The Nature of the Soul
Chapter One. Soul as Form
Chapter Two. The Psychic Hierarchy (I)
Chapter Three. The Psychic Hierarchy (II)
Nutrition
Chapter Four. Methodological Remarks; Nutrition
Sense-perception
Chapter Five. Sensation
Chapter Six. The Types of Sense-object
Chapter Seven. Sight
Chapter Eight. Hearing
Chapter Nine. Smell
Chapter Ten. Taste
Chapter Eleven. Touch
Chapter Twelve. Perception as the Reception of
Form without Matter
BOOK III
Sense-perception
Chapter One. General Problems of Perception (I)
Chapter Two. General Problems of Perception (II)
Imagination
Chapter Three. Imagination
Intellect
Chapter Four. Intellect (I)
Chapter Five. Intellect (II); Active and Passive
Chapter Six. Intellect (III); Simple and Complex
Chapter Seven. Appendix to Sense and Mind
Chapter Eight. Summary of Account of Sense-
perception and Thought
Motivation
Chapter Nine. Motivation (I) The Division of
the Soul
Chapter Ten. Motivation (II)
Chapter Eleven. Appendix to Motivation
Appendix: Animal Survival
Chapter Twelve. The Teleological Context (I)
Chapter Thirteen. The Teleological Context (II)
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
