De anima
la fisica dell'anima e delle sue facoltà sensoriali
by Aristotle · first published 1877
10mentions
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8HN commenters
2018–2025first – last mentioned
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Aristotle's Physics, Metaphysics, and De Anima.
on “Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?” ↗…Capitalist society that has orders of magnitude more abundance, can get out of said paralysis. Not. At. All. Edit: I wanna be really clear. Aristotle has some very useful things to say, particularly in De Anima, which, IMO, is the sole philosophical definition of a soul that is capable of being set in alignment with the concept of evolution, but the Ethics is a really big hype job that has lots of important…
on “Ennui: How to Overcome Chronic Boredom” ↗…animals, sure, but there's a difference between the two degrees of attribution. Attributing consciousness is far more conservative than attributing human qualities in an equivocal way. Take Aristotle's De Anima, for example, in which he analyzes the varieties of life according to the kind of "soul" each possesses, and such that each higher soul entails the powers of all the lower souls. The three kinds he identifies,…
on “Are animals conscious? New research” ↗…are particularly “special.” Instead, there are spirits in everything, [...] "Empedocles [says that the soul] is composed of all the elements and that each of them actually is a soul [...]" (Aristotle, De Anima, 404b11) "All things are full of gods." (Thales. From Aristotle, De Anima, 411a) "Now consider all the stars and the moon and the years and the months and all the seasons: what can we do except repeat…
on “Why Westerners Fear Robots and the Japanese Do Not” ↗…emotions, desires or consciousness. In the context of intellectual history, this Cartesian view is rather recent. Aristotle, for example, describes plants, animals and human beings quite differently in De Anima. In his analysis, human beings entail all faculties that are essentially proper to animals, and non-human animals entail all faculties that are essentially proper to plants; the entailment is transitive…
on “Why humans need to rethink their place in the animal kingdom” ↗…the definition/actual taking place of the Good lies in some other plane, we can't participate in it so no one is or can be good), but the idea is the same even when he's talking about what a soul is in De Anima. Aristotle doesn't believe in 'souls' in the way we think of them as religio-spiritual entities that exceed the capacity of the body; a 'soul' for Aristotle is the body but in a way that radically challenges…
on “How the modern world arose from imaginary numbers” ↗…modern philosophy, specifically Descartes, characterized animals as zombie meat machines (pure res extensa). Aristotle, by contrast, did not deny non-human animals sensation or pain, as is evident in De Anima in which he reasons that sensation is in fact necessary for animals (this occurs in the context of determining the necessary faculties entailed by the nutritive soul, the sensitive soul, and the intellectual…
on “Infants' sense of pain is recognized, finally (1987)” ↗…as human. "The aliens" would be, in some sense, "one of us", even if they were to differ phylogenetically. This becomes quite interesting in the context of an analysis along the lines of Aristotle's "De Anima", as, for example, rationality has definite entailments when it comes to anatomy and physiology. [0] https://a.co/d/aL0An6N [1] https://a.co/d/hMKWLjm [2] I am using the terms "genus" and "species"…
on “What is a species, anyway?” ↗> Dogs think. The fashion in which they do it is recognized by Aristotle in Historia Animalium, as well as in Metaphysics and De Anima. He also mentions it in passing in Nicomachean Ethics (III.ii) > Choice, then, seems to be voluntary, but not the same thing as the voluntary; the latter extends more widely. For both children and the…
on “Aristotle – How to live a good life” ↗Interesting aside about the Vienna circle and isomorphism. I suspect that’s where Hayek got his idea that mind and representation are isomorphic, echoing Aristotle’s assertion in “On the Soul” / De Anima that the mind becomes the object of perception.
on “Category Theory Illustrated – Natural Transformations” ↗