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2 results

  • Chapter 1 - Aristotle’s De anima and the Study of Perishable Living Beings

  • Andrea Falcon, Concordia University, Montréal
  • Book:
    The Architecture of the Science of Living Beings
    Published online:
    30 May 2024
    Print publication:
    06 June 2024, pp 15-45
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  • Summary

    Aristotle’s De anima provides the foundation for a theoretically informed study of perishable life on the crucial assumption that the soul is that which distinguishes what is alive from what is not. It is because Aristotle and Theophrastus take animals and plants to be different kinds of perishable living beings that they are justified in approaching the study of perishable life through separate studies of animals and plants. The chapter offers a survey of the discourse on and around life before Aristotle and Theophrastus with a focus on Plato and the doxographical information on the Presocratic investigation of nature. It also considers the way in which the study of life is narrow down to the study of perishable life, that is animals and plants, as a result of the conceptual work done in Aristotle’s De anima.

The Architecture of the Science of Living Beings
  • Aristotle and Theophrastus on Animals and Plants
  • Andrea Falcon
  • Published online:
    30 May 2024
    Print publication:
    06 June 2024
  • Scholars have paid ample attention to Aristotle's works on animals. By contrast, they have paid little or no attention to Theophrastus' writings on plants. That is unfortunate because there was a shared research project in the early Peripatos which amounted to a systematic, and theoretically motivated, study of perishable living beings (animals and plants). This is the first sustained attempt to explore how Aristotle and Theophrastus envisioned this study, with attention focused primarily on its deep structure. That entails giving full consideration to a few transitional passages where Aristotle and Theophrastus offer their own description of what they are trying to do. What emerges is a novel, sophisticated, and largely idiosyncratic approach to the topic of life. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.