Past Event: WGAP: Hendrik Lorenz (Princeton Univ.)

Hendrik Lorenz from Princeton will be the guest speaker for WGAP on November 14, 2019. The title of the talk is “Aristotle on Defining Souls”.

Abstract:
Chapter 1 of Book 2 of Aristotle’s De Anima has received a great deal of attention from scholars in the last five decades. Much of this attention has been focused on Aristotle’s attempt to apply his hylomorphic analysis of perceptible objects to human beings and other living things. The subsequent chapters 2 and 3 have received far less attention. I think that this imbalance of attention has been an obstacle to understanding Aristotle’s views about the soul as an object of definition and knowledge. My main topic in what follows is how dramatically chapters 2 and 3 change the picture concerning definition and the soul that is presented in chapter 1. The most important upshot of this change is that the soul as such is not real and can therefore not be defined. Souls fall into three real kinds that can be rigorously defined.