Editors: Giouli Korobili & Roberto Lo Presti (Humboldt University of Berlin) in collaboration with Dorothea Keller
Publisher: De Gruyter, 2021
This volume is a detailed study of the concept of the nutritive capacity of the soul and its actual manifestation in living bodies (plants, animals, humans) in Aristotle and Aristotelianism. Aristotle’s innovative analysis of the nutritive faculty has laid the intellectual foundation for the increasing appreciation of nutrition as a prerequisite for the maintenance of life and health that can be observed in the history of Greek thought. According to Aristotle, apart from nutrition, the nutritive part of the soul is also responsible for or interacts with many other bodily functions or mechanisms, such as digestion, growth, reproduction, sleep, and the innate heat.
After Aristotle, these concepts were used and further developed by a great number of Peripatetic philosophers, commentators on Aristotle and Arabic thinkers until early modern times. This volume is the first of its kind to provide an in-depth survey of the development of this rather philosophical concept from Aristotle to early modern thinkers. It is of key interest to scholars working on classical, medieval and early modern psycho-physiological accounts of living things, historians and philosophers of science, biologists with interests in the history of science, and, generally, students of the history of philosophy and science.
Contents
Abbreviations
Introduction
James G. Lennox – ‘Most Natural Among the Functions of Living Things’: Puzzles about Reproduction as a Nutritive Function
Mary Louise Gill – Method and Nutritive Soul in Aristotle’s De Anima II,4
R.A.H. King – Nutrition and Hylomorphism in Aristotle
Sophia M. Connell – The Female Contribution to Generation and Nutritive Soul in Aristotle’s Embryology
Andrea Libero Carbone – Why do not Animals Grow on Without End? Aristotle on Nutrition and Form
David Lefebvre – Looking for the Formative Power in Aristotle’s Nutritive Soul
Hynek Bartoš – Aristotle and his Medical Precursors on Digestion and Nutrition
Giouli Korobili – Aristotle on the Role of Heat in Plant Life
Robert Mayhew – Reading and Sleep in Pseudo-Aristotle, Problemata XVIII,7: On the Nutritive Soul’s Influence on the Intellect, and Vice Versa
Gweltaz Guyomarc’h – Dividing an Apple: The Nutritive Soul and Soul Parts in Alexander of Aphrodisias
Tommaso Alpina – Is Nutrition a Sufficient Condition for Life? Avicenna’s Position Between Natural Philosophy and Medicine
Martin Klein – Digestive Problems: John Buridan on Human Nutrition
Christoph Sander – Magnetism and Nutrition: An Ancient Idea Fleshed out in Early Modern Natural Philosophy, Medicine, and Alchemy
Elisabeth Moreau – From Food to Elements and Humors: Digestion in Late Renaissance Galenism
Bernd Roling – Standstill or Death: Early modern Debates on the Hibernation of Animals
Andreas Blank – Antonio Ponce de Santacruz on Nutrition and the Question of Emergence
Index locorum
Index rerum
Source: https://www.degruyter.com/view/title/573782?rskey=gnB2FW&result=1&tab_body=overview