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Episode 130: Aristotle’s “De Anima”: What Is Life?

December 28, 2015 by Mark Linsenmayer 12 Comments

http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/partiallyexaminedlife/PEL_ep_130_12-6-15.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:57:24 — 107.6MB)

On De Anima or On the Soul (350 BCE), books 1 and 2. We lead off with listener mail; Aristotle starts 18 minutes in.

What can this ancient text tell us about biological life? Much of the interest and difficulty here is the very different conceptual schemes at play: What counts as a scientific explanation? Aristotle gives a highly general account about what, for all living things, makes them alive. He describes life as "the first actuality of a natural body which has organs," meaning that bodies (our bodies, plant bodies, animal bodies) truly express their nature only when they're growing and reproducing and all that stuff that bodies do. The body itself is potential, and life is its actuality. So what the heck kind of explanation is that, and how does it tie into all that metaphysical stuff you may have heard about Aristotle concerning forms and different types of causation and substances?

Seth returns to complete the formal foursome as we slowly penetrate this difficult text. With this one more than others, you'd be well advised to follow along in the text. This online translation by D.W. Hamlyn should do the trick. The line-by-line commentary that Seth refers to is by Eugene T. Gendlin.

Episode 131 will continue our exploration of this book, focusing on book 3, where Aristotle presents what's often been described as the first work in the philosophy of mind: He'll focus there on the intellect, on how the mind can know things, on whether the intellect is separable from the body.

End song: "Intermission Song" from the 1993 Mark Lint album Spanish Armada: Songs of Love and Related Neuroses.

Aristotle picture by Genevieve Arnold.

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Filed Under: Podcast Episodes Tagged With: Aristotle, De Anima, philosophy of biology, philosophy of science, philosophy podcast

Comments

  1. Evan says

    January 5, 2016 at 10:06 pm

    I like how you guys do philosophy. There are lots of places people can go for critiques and stuff on current affairs.

    Paying attention to a text is something rare and valuable.

    Reply
    • Mark Linsenmayer says

      January 8, 2016 at 11:12 am

      Thanks, Evan. And next we’re having Massimo P. to talk about Stoicism (Seneca). He (Massimo) recommends daily meditation on Stoic teachings not unlike (in approach, if not in actual content) what I’m seeing on your website. So I’d be interested to see you weigh in here when we post that.

      Reply
  2. Ferix says

    January 8, 2016 at 1:19 am

    The more you guys do on Aristotle, the more he impresses me. I used to have the exact same perception of him as Wes (or maybe it was Seth) – that he was stodgier and more scientist than philosopher. I’ve completely flipped on him now. Can’t wait for Book 3.

    Reply
  3. Ally says

    January 8, 2016 at 7:40 am

    Since Valentines Day is coming up, can you do a podcast on philosophies about love? 🙂

    Reply
    • Mark Linsenmayer says

      January 8, 2016 at 11:10 am

      An excellent idea. We have one with a celebrity guest in the works, but it wasn’t yet actually on the calendar. I’ve pinged him to see if we can work it in for ep. 133 (if I’m counting right). Thanks!

      Reply
  4. Jenny Nguyen says

    November 24, 2018 at 3:17 pm

    I think you guys are doing great. I am a woman and I find it sickening when feminists make those dumb comments about identity politics, as if women have any different insight into reality than men. We are all humans! Philosophy seeks to understand the soul of the subject and doesn’t just look at the surface; neither is it historicist and concerned with race/class/gender. Philosophy delves into the perennial questions. If people want to talk about irrelevant things, they can just read CNN.

    Reply
  5. Erick Mitsak says

    June 27, 2022 at 4:51 am

    It’s 2022 now… I’m listening to ye olde worlde of 2015! How young we all were then! I guess you guys no longer do these podcasts anymore? It’s definitely unlikely…. But if you ARE still doing them, then I doff my imaginary hat from my avatar flat-nosed catface head! Doff! And Doff again!..
    Hey – so do you guys ever deal with religiosity and philosophy? i.e. like what came first? and/or did, say, the Abrahamic religions retrospectively borrow from older philosophies? Or particular religious writers obviously use philosophies to bolster their religious views? etc And where is sodomy in all of this?

    Reply
    • Evan says

      June 28, 2022 at 12:46 am

      Hi Erick, they’re still doing the podcasts. They tend to steer clear of religion (though they did one on Jesus as a philosopher). They mostly stick to dealing with a text rather than its relation to its sources and so on. Any faith or philosophy in some sense borrows from its context and past. If you’re interested in Old Testament relation to its background John H Walton is good (conservative but across the history and literature).

      Reply

Trackbacks

  1. Episode 131: Aristotle’s “De Anima”: What Is the Mind? (Part One) | The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog says:
    January 11, 2016 at 7:00 am

    […] is the intellect? In ep. 130, we talked about Aristotle's idea of the soul as the form of the body and about two of its […]

    Reply
  2. Episode 163: Guest Stewart Umphrey on Natural Kinds (Part One) | The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog says:
    May 1, 2017 at 7:20 am

    […] listen to some of our previous discussions in metaphysics before tackling this one. For instance, ep. 130 on Aristotle's De Anima, ep. 126 on Saul Kripke, ep. 6 on Leibniz's monads, and ep 68. where we talked to David Chalmers […]

    Reply
  3. Science, Religion, and Secularism Part IX: Did Heliocentrism Knock Humanity off Its Perch? | The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog says:
    November 12, 2017 at 8:43 pm

    […] the medieval conception of the cosmos (again partly inherited from the Greeks, in particular Aristotle and Ptolemy, and partly from Hebrew Scripture) put human beings near the center of things, but not […]

    Reply
  4. The Philosophy of Aristotle: A Collection of Online Resources and Key Quotes - The Daily Idea says:
    November 13, 2019 at 2:00 pm

    […] Aristotle’s “De Anima”: What Is Life? […]

    Reply

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