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5 books match the query 'De anima'

cover of De Anima, or About the Soul

De Anima, or About the Soul

Glen Aristotle

St. Augustine's Press, 2021

The De Anima (On the Soul) is the first and most general of Aristotle’s biological works and as such is the most important work in the study of nature after the Physics of Aristotle. It is presupposed to Aristotle’s Sense and the Sensible, Memory and Reminiscence, and his many other biological works. 

In this text, Aristotle discusses his predecessors’ views of life, defines the principle of life (“soul”), discusses the principle sorts of living things (plants, animals, and human beings), and analyzes the chief activities of each sort of life. In the case of rational life, he shows that the ability to think implies an immaterial aspect to the human soul.

The De Anima is necessary not only to the study of biology, but also advances the understanding of metaphysics, of ethics and of politics, and even of logic, insofar as logic directs the acts of the human mind.

Like Coughlin’s translation of Aristotle’s Physics (also published by St. Augustine Press), this translation attempts to be literal and concrete. The edition includes the translation, introduction, glossary, index, and explanatory notes.
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cover of Mortal Imitations of Divine Life: The Nature of the Soul in Aristotle's De Anima

Mortal Imitations of Divine Life

The Nature of the Soul in Aristotle's De Anima

Eli Diamond

Northwestern University Press, 2015

In Mortal Imitations of Divine Life, Diamond offers an interpretation of De Anima, which explains how and why Aristotle places souls in a hierarchy of value. Aristotle’s central intention in De Anima is to discover the nature and essence of soul—the prin­ciple of living beings. He does so by identifying the common structures underlying every living activity, whether it be eating, perceiving, thinking, or moving through space. As Diamond demonstrates through close readings of De Anima, the nature of the soul is most clearly seen in its divine life, while the embodied soul’s other activi­ties are progressively clear approximations of this principle. This interpretation shows how Aristotle’s psychology and biology cannot be properly understood apart from his theological conception of God as life, and offers a new explanation of De Anima’s unity of purpose and structure.


 
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cover of Perception in Aristotle’s Ethics

Perception in Aristotle’s Ethics

Eve Rabinoff

Northwestern University Press, 2018

Perception in Aristotle's Ethics seeks to demonstrate that living an ethical life requires a mode of perception that is best called ethical perception. Specifically, drawing primarily on Aristotle’s accounts of perception and ethics in De anima and Nicomachean Ethics, Eve Rabinoff argues that the faculty of perception (aisthesis), which is often thought to be an entirely physical phenomenon, is informed by intellect and has an ethical dimension insofar as it involves the perception of particulars in their ethical significance, as things that are good or bad in themselves and as occasions to act. Further, she contends, virtuous action requires this ethical perception, according to Aristotle, and ethical development consists in the achievement of the harmony of the intellectual and perceptual, rational and nonrational, parts of the soul.

Rabinoff's project is philosophically motivated both by the details of Aristotle’s thought and more generally by an increasing philosophical awareness that the ethical agent is an embodied, situated individual, rather than primarily a disembodied, abstract rational will. 
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cover of Quaestiones super Secundum et Tertium De Anima Aristotelis (B. Ioannis Duns Scoti Opera Philosophica, Volume 5)

Quaestiones super Secundum et Tertium De Anima Aristotelis (B. Ioannis Duns Scoti Opera Philosophica, Volume 5)

John Duns Scotus

Catholic University of America Press, 2006

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cover of Thomistic Considerations: Themes in Aquinas, Aristotle, Augustine, Dante and Eliot

Thomistic Considerations

Themes in Aquinas, Aristotle, Augustine, Dante and Eliot

Kevin White

Catholic University of America Press, 2026

This collection of essays considers a variety of themes in philosophy, theology, and poetry, three ways of thinking that share a certain openness and comprehensiveness. The essays show how philosophy, theology, and poetry are ways of thinking in the medium of words—in large part in the medium of written words—against the background of all things and from the point of view of all of human life. As the essays make clear, philosophy, theology, and poetry are special ways of thinking and speaking, but they are the contrary of specializations. Many of the themes are perennial preoccupations in philosophy: being, time, number, friendship, pleasure, purpose, choice, reason, and order. Others are particular concerns of theology and poetry, such as the divine presence and absence in the world, and poetic form. The volume is divided into two parts: a first part consisting of eight essays on themes in Aquinas’s work, and a second part consisting of five essays on other authors whose thought, in one way or another, has an affinity with the thought of Aquinas: Aristotle, Augustine, Anselm, Dante, T. S. Eliot, and Robert Sokolowski. The volume’s title pays homage to Aquinas’s use of the Latin word consideratio, a favorite term of the scholastics that could refer to any careful attending to what one knows. The essays illustrate ways in which considerations undertaken in philosophy, theology, and poetry provide points of survey from which to take in, to the extent we can, the great panorama of the whole of things.
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