Klaus Corcilius

This paper offers a new interpretation of Aristotle’s account of basic perceptual discrimination in On the Soul II 11. This is the discrimination of single perceptible qualities like, e.g., ‘red’, ‘sweet’, ‘hot’ of which even the simplest animals on the scala naturae are capable. It is argued that, for Aristotle, basic perceptual discrimination is largely—but not entirely—a causal process in the course of which a perceptible quality is isolated from the matter of a sensory input. That isolation is interpreted as the result of a juxtaposition of the sensory input with a neutral perceptual value provided by the perceptual soul. The contrast resulting from that juxtaposition is basic phenomenal content like, e.g., ‘red’, ‘hot’, ’sweet’. Basic perceptual discrimination is thus interpreted as the production of phenomenal content in the animal organism. The paper ends with a discussion of the underlying notion of ‘juxtaposition’ of perceptual input with the soul and an interpretation of basic perceptual awareness as the reception of discriminated content.

The phenomena of life have special significance for us. Living things impress us in ways inanimate things couldn’t. This is because livings things do things. They act for the sake of some purpose, a purpose which moreover seems to be their very own. They instil in us the impression that there is something they are ‘up to’. This certainly seems to be the case with animals and, to a lesser degree, with plants and other growing things. Their goal-directed behaviours are presumably the reasons why living things are closer, more interesting – and sometimes also more repelling – to us than inanimate things: they have, one might say, certain interests they pursue. We can understand these interests and therefore interact with these pursuits in sometimes cooperative and sometimes inimical ways. This is why our attitudes towards animate things are so very different from our attitudes towards the inanimate.

This contribution comments on Aristotle’s De Motu Animalium 6 (MA 6). In this chapter Aristotle resumes the discussion of the common cause of animal self-motion. For this purpose the chapter introduces the technical vocabulary from De Anima III 9–11, e.g. desire, phantasia, nous, perception. The contribution argues, among other things, that MA 6 marks the beginning, not of Aristotle’s teleological explanation of animal motion, but of his common causal explanation of animal self-motion in the sense of the efficient cause common to all sublunary living beings capable of moving themselves locally.

This chapter first argues against the widely accepted “mentalist” interpretation of Aristotle’s conception of the perception of external objects. On that view, the perception of objects results from an act of synthesis of the diverse perceptual input provided by the different sense modalities. I argue that Aristotle’s conception of perception does not require such mental “construction” of external objects. For him, we unfailingly perceive external objects by way of modally specific perception: perception without qualification is primarily of external 3-D objects, while modally specific perception is of perceptual qualities. As the special senses cannot operate in isolation from the perceptual system as a whole, it follows that we see colors, hear sounds, etc., and thereby perceive the objects whose colors and sounds they are. The second part offers a causal interpretation of Aristotle’s definition of perception as “reception of the form without the matter,” according to which the causal history of sensory affection fixes the content of the resulting act of perception: perception is cognitive in virtue of being the matterless presence of external things’ qualities in the perceiver.

At the outset of De memoria 1 (hereafter Mem. 1) Aristotle promises a scientific definition of memory, a causal account that explains how episodes of memory occur, and a clarification as to the location of memory that identifies the main part of the soul involved in the exercise of memory. All these promises are fulfilled by the end of Mem. 1. While Aristotle has a great deal to say on human memory, his first and foremost goal is to develop an account that explains the role of memory and remembering in animal life. This article discusses the explanatory and definitional strategies adopted in Aristotle’s exploration of the phenomenon of memory. It also offers an interpretation of the whole chapter from a methodological perspective.

Aristoteles, Schüler Platons und Lehrer Alexanders des Großen, gilt als einer der bedeutendsten Denker überhaupt. Er hat ein umfangreiches, aber auch anspruchsvolles und schwer zugängliches Werk hinterlassen. Seine Schriften sind nicht nur grundlegend für die weitere Entwicklung in Wissenschaften und Philosophie, sondern sie stellen nach wie vor auch eine lebendige philosophische Herausforderung dar: Aristoteles zu studieren, heißt deswegen letztlich nichts anderes als zu philosophieren. Dieses Handbuch bietet einen Überblick über alle Werke und Werkgruppen, es informiert über Grundbegriffe, die sich durch sein Werk ziehen (wie Glück, Tugend, Form, Materie, Syllogismus, Substanz etc.), und es verfolgt die umfangreiche Rezeption vom Peripatos über die frühe Neuzeit bis in die Gegenwart. Für die 2. Auflage wurde das Handbuch umfassend durchgesehen, aktualisiert und um Stichworte zu den Themen Frauen, Mathematik, Mensch, Phronesis und Sklaverei erweitert. Ein neues Kapitel zu Existenzphilosophie und Hermeneutik schließt eine Lücke der Aristoteles-Rezeption im 20. Jahrhundert.

Aristoteles’ Traktat De anima untersucht die Natur der Seele. Unter ›Seele‹ ist dabei jedoch nicht das subjektive Zentrum unseres mentalen Lebens zu verstehen, sondern dasjenige Prinzip, dessen Vorhandensein lebendige von leblosen Körpern unterscheidet. Es umfasst alle Formen des Lebendigen, also pflanzliches, tierisches und menschliches Leben. Ziel der Schrift ist es, die Seele zu definieren, d.h. zu erklären, was es für diese Formen des Lebendigen jeweils heißt, lebendig zu sein. Diskutiert werden: der vegetative Selbsterhalt, Wahrnehmung, menschliches Denken sowie die Ortsbewegung der Lebewesen. De anima gehört zu den faszinierendsten, philosophisch lohnendsten, aber auch schwierigeren Schriften des Aristoteles. Die zweisprachige Studienausgabe bietet eine vollständige Neu­übersetzung. Benutzt wird die Edition des griechischen Textes von Aurelius Förster (Budapest 1912), von der sich die heutzutage sehr verbreitete Ausgabe von W. D. Ross textkritisch hat leiten lassen (OCT 1956 und 1971). Sie ist auch durch die späteren Ausgaben von Siwek (Rom 1965) und Jannone (Paris 1966) nicht ersetzt. Eine Einleitung führt in die Grundlagen und Voraussetzungen der aristotelischen Seelenlehre ein und gibt einen Überblick über den Gedankengang der Schrift. Der Kommentarteil ist so knapp wie möglich gehalten. Im Anhang sind ein Glossar und ein Verzeichnis der Abweichungen von der Ausgabe von Ross beigefügt.

This book is concerned with Aristotle’s definition of the human capacity for rational thinking (nous) offered in De anima. For Aristotle, nous is the principle, and ultimate explanans, of all the phenomena of human thinking. The book presents an in-depth interpretation of De anima III 4–8 as a single and coherent philosophical argument. More specifically, the book argues for the following views: (i) Rationalism. Humans come to know the world via two fundamentally different cognitive powers: nous and perception. They are fundamentally different cognitive powers because the nature of their corresponding object is fundamentally different; (ii) Essentialism. The human power for thinking is defined as a capacity for directly grasping the essences of everything there is, including itself. It is this very capacity that Aristotle shows to be the principle of all other kinds of human thinking; (iii) Separatism. Human nous is unmixed with the body, has no dedicated bodily organ, and is separable from the body. As a result, it cannot be assimilated to any of the other parts of the soul. While nous belongs to our essence as human beings, it is not part of the natural world; (iv) Embeddedness in the cognitive soul. Human nous is embedded in a cognitive soul. Among other things, this means that the distinctive activity of human nous—thinking—can only take place in the context of a larger set of activities which are common to the body and the soul.

Thema der kleinen und bemerkenswerten Spätschrift des Aristoteles ist die Beantwortung der Frage ›Wie bewegt die Seele den Körper?‹, d.h. der Frage nach dem Auslöser der Selbstbewegung von Lebewesen. Dies beinhaltet alle gewollten oder auch ungewollten Akte der Selbstbewegung animalischer und menschlicher Organismen. Damit steht die Schrift in der Mitte zwischen der allgemeinen Bewegungslehre des Aristoteles und der in seinen früheren Schriften abgehandelten Biologie und Psychologie, auf die er hier häufig zurückgreift. In 'De motu' wird eine umfassende biologische Theorie des animalischen und menschlichen Handelns formuliert, die handlungstheoretischen und physiologischen Fragen gleichermaßen gerecht zu werden sucht. Auch äußert Aristoteles sich darin erstmals zum berühmten ›angeborenen Pneuma‹, in dem er eine vermittelnde Instanz in der Bewegungsübertragung sieht. Diese Ausgabe bietet die Schrift, die seit der Edition von Martha Nussbaum (1978) in den Blickpunkt der Forschung geraten ist, in einer Neuedition des griechischen Originaltextes von Oliver Primavesi und in einer neuen deutschen Übersetzung und Erläuterung von Klaus Corcilius. Der griechische Text konnte an vielen Stellen durch die Heranziehung des zweiten selbstständigen Überlieferungszweiges verbessert werden, der allen früheren Herausgebern unbekannt geblieben war und den Oliver Primavesi 2011 auf dem 19. Symposium Aristotelicum zu 'De motu' vorgestellt hat.

This important and challenging book is the fruit of many years of engagement with Aristotle’s thinking about the soul-body relation by one of the most distinguished experts in the field. David Charles does what many have tried to do during the past fifty years, but he does it with more radicalism and ingenuity than, as far as I can see, anyone has done before. He applies Aristotle’s psychological hylomorphism to the modern mind-body problem arguing that it is both distinctive and philosophically preferable to all other positions in the post-Cartesian theoretical landscape, including recent so-called neo-Aristotelian theories of the mind. The book conveys a very clear philosophical message. According to Charles, contemporary analytic philosophy of mind is still very much in the grip of a profoundly Cartesian way of distinguishing mind and body. This, he argues, besets it with a problem which is both superfluous and prevents it from an adequate understanding of the phenomena of the mental: modern analytic philosophers of mind continue to conceive of mind and body as definitionally separate, that is, in such a way that their definitions do not contain reference to each other. Charles’ point is that definitional separability is the common conceptual core shared by all post-Cartesian treatments of the mind-body problem, that it is a residue of Descartes’ substance-dualism, and that it suffices by itself to create the host of problems characteristic of the post-Cartesian predicament. How can definitionally separate entities interact with each other? How do they come to form unified psychophysical selves in the first place? Charles argues that this way of carving up reality makes truly gapless accounts of the relation between mind and body impossible from the outset. The underlying conceptions of the purely physical (res extensa) and the purely mental (res cogitans), that is, the conceptions that gave rise to the mind-body problem in the first place, are false abstractions, and the very cause of the need to somehow bridge or otherwise overcome the gap they produce.

Among scholars it is common to assume that Aristotle’s practical syllogism does two jobs. It is often taken to explain both animal motion and human deliberation. I will call this the “two-jobs view of the practical syllogism”. In what follows, I will argue that the two-jobs view of the practical syllogism is not working. I will then try to give a very brief and incomplete sketch of how to conceive of a non-two-jobs view of the Aristotelian practical syllogism. Finally, I will discuss two possible problems for the non-two-jobs view.