Aristotle’s de Anima

Ronald Polansky is Professor of Philosophy at Duquesne University. Editor of the journal Ancient Philosophy since founding it in 1979, he is the author of Philosophy and Knowledge: A Commentary on Plato's Theaetetus, and co-editor of Bioethics: Ancient Themes in Contemporary Issues.

Aristotle's De Anima was the first systematic philosophical account of the soul and its faculties.

Introduction; 1. The De Anima and self-knowledge; 2. Study of soul in relation to physics; 3. The cognitive faculties and physics; 4. Aristotle's procedures and the quest for thoroughness; 5. Background assumptions for study of the soul; 6. The truth and interest of the De Anima; 7. The text of the De Anima; Book 1: 1. The nobility and difficulty of study of soul. Its connection with body; 2. The predecessors' use of soul to account for motion and perception; 3. Criticism of predecessors' way of accounting for motion; 4. Criticism of the harmonia view as an account of motion; 5. Criticism of predecessors' way of accounting for cognition; Book 2: 1. Definition of soul; 2. What is life?; 3. How powers of soul are distributed and united in the soul; 4. The nutritive faculty, its object and subfaculties; 5. Clarification of being affected, living as saving, and the first definition of sense; 6. The three sorts of sensible objects; 7. Vision, its medium, and object; 8. Hearing, sound, and voice; 9. Smell and odor; 10. Taste is a contact sense. The tasteable; 11. Touch, the tangibles, and sense as a mean; 12. Definition of sense and whether sensibles affect non-perceiving bodies; Book 3: 1. In the world as it is there can be but the five senses; 2. What allows for perceiving that we perceive? Sense comes together in a common power so that the five senses are subfaculties of a central sense faculty; 3. Distinguishing sense and thought. What is phantasia?; 4. What is mind as that capable of thinking all things; 5. What enables thinking to occur; 6. The sorts of intelligible objects; 7. Phantasia has a role in all thinking; 8. The mind can think all things; 9. There is a capacity for progressive motion; 10. The desiderative capacity is the primary cause of progressive motion; 11. Even the simplest animals have indefinite phantasia and calculative phantasia fits the account of progressive motion; 12. The necessary order of the faculties of the soul; 13. The sort of body requisite to support the order of the faculties of soul; Bibliography.