This book investigates Aristotelian psychology through his works and commentaries on them, including De Sensu, De Memoria and De Somno et Vigilia. Authors present original research papers inviting readers to consider the provenance of Aristotelian ideas and interpretations of them, on topics ranging from reality to dreams and spirituality. Aristotle’s doctrine of the ‘common sense’, his notion of transparency and the generation of colours are amongst the themes explored. Chapters are presented chronologically, enabling the reader to trace influences across the boundaries of linguistic traditions. Commentaries from historical figures featured in this work include those of Michael of Ephesus (c. 1120), Albert the Great and Gersonides’ (1288–1344). Discoveries in 9th-century Arabic adaptations, Byzantine commentaries and Renaissance paraphrases of Aristotle’s work are also presented. The editors’ introduction outlines the main historical developments of the themes discussed, preparing the reader for the cross-cultural and interdisciplinary perspectives presented in this work. Scholars of philosophy and psychology and those with an interest in Aristotelianism will highly value the original research that is presented in this work. The Introduction and Chapter 4 of this book are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Addresses the importance of ancient literature for Byzantine society and explores various ways of recycling and understanding ancient works.

This book contains a collection of papers devoted to the problems of body, mind and soul in medieval Europe between 1200 and 1420. Modern discussions of the mind-body relationship seldom look back into the past further than the psycho-somatic dualism of Descartes which started the mechanistic approach in biology and medicine. The authors of the volume go beyond that fault line to investigate the tradition of medieval natural philosophy and its ancient sources and analyze the issues forming a borderland between physiology and psychology. They also demonstrate that the medieval tradition was rich and diverse for it offered a wide variety of the discussed problems as well as the methodological approaches. This volume is the first attempt to cover a diversity of topics and methods employed in the medieval debates on body, mind and soul as well as their interrelationships. The Embodied Soul is a must-have for all those interested in puzzling dilemmas of how a living organism functions and how its inner life can be explained as well as for all those interested in the history of thought in general. Chapter 14 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Does a plant shrink at night and swell in the day, like an animal breathing in and out? For a long time, the Galenic concept of spiritus provided a causal explanation for human and animal life and perception. Albert the Great (1200-1280), whose honorific acknowledges among other things his pioneering work on biology, extended the concept to plants. This is only one of the remarkable concepts studied in this book, the first comparative study of Albert's concept of spiritus. It unveils the Arabic roots of his early psychophysiology and the original developments found in his mature Aristotelian paraphrases.

Theodore Metochites’ Aristotelian paraphrases (c. 1312), covering all 40 books of the Stagirite’s extant works on natural philosophy, constitute one of the major achievements of late Byzantine learning. This volume offers the first critical edition of Metochites’ paraphrases of the three books of the De anima, accompanied by an introduction and an English translation with an apparatus of parallel passages in Aristotle’s ancient commentators. The first part of the introduction presents and evaluates the sources for the text, consisting of thirteen Greek manuscripts, a 15th-century Greek epitome and a 16th-century Latin translation. The genealogical relationships between these are established on the basis of separative and conjunctive errors, identified, inter alia, through critical discussions of more than 300 passages. The second part of the introduction discusses the nature, purpose and sources of the paraphrases as well as several linguistic questions with implications for editing and translating the text. The third part of the introduction sets out the principles of this edition and translation.

This book is devoted to the last part of Aristotle’s collection of short treatises known today as the Parva Naturalia, i.e. the treatise On Youth and Old Age, on Life and Death, on Respiration. In the three main sections of the book, the author offers a translation, a commentary and a thorough analysis of this work. The author argues in favour of the unity of the work and contextualises its ideas within Aristotle’s corpus and the medical tradition of his time. After an Introduction to the nature of the work and its significance for the history of natural philosophy and science, a new English translation follows, along with a detailed commentary of Chapters 1-6, which combines philosophical discussion with philological observations. The book includes four interpretive essays, which tackle problems related to the whole treatise on a more philosophical basis, including questions about the structure and unity of the work, the organisation of the material, Aristotle’s methodological principles, his aims and target audience as well as the relevance of his selected themes to the thematic agenda of some Hippocratic writings. This book is of interest to students and researchers in Aristotle’s psychophysiology, and his views about the embodied mind, as well as to anyone concerned with the history of natural philosophy and science more generally.