Book description
For the Pre-Socratic philosophers the soul was the source of movement
and sensation, while for Plato it was the seat of being, metaphysically
distinct from the body that it was forced temporarily to inhabit.
Plato's student Aristotle was determined to test the truth of both these
beliefs against the emerging sciences of logic and biology. His
examination of the huge variety of living organisms - the enormous range
of their behaviour, their powers and their perceptual sophistication -
convinced him of the inadequacy both of a materialist reduction and of a
Platonic sublimation of the soul. In De Anima, he sought to set out his
theory of the soul as the ultimate reality of embodied form and produced
both a masterpiece of philosophical insight and a psychology of
perennially fascinating subtlety.
Aristotle was born in 384BC. For twenty years he studied at Athens at
the Academy of Plato, on whose death in 347 he left, and some time
later became tutor to Alexander the Great. On Alexander's succession
to the throne of Macedonia in 336, Aristotle returned to Athens and
established his school and research institute, the Lyceum. After
Alexander's death he was driven out of Athens and feld to Chalcis in
Euboea where he died in 322. His writings profoundly affected the
whole course of ancient and medieval philosophy.
HUGH LAWSON-TANCRED was born in 1955 and educated at Eton and
Balliol College, Oxford. He is a Departmental Fellow in the Department
of Philosophy at Birkbeck College in the University of London. He has
published extensively on Aristotle and Plato and is currently engaged
in research in computational linguistics. He translates widely from
the Slavonic and Scandinavian languages. His translations of
Aristotle's The Art of Rhetoric and De Anima are also published in
Penguin Classics. He is married with a daughter and two sons and lives
in North London and Somerset.
