Lesesaal

On the Soul (De anima)

Aristotle

The founding treatise of psychology. After reviewing earlier theories, it defines the soul as the form or “first actuality” of a natural organised body and studies it through its faculties: nutrition, perception, imagination, desire, locomotion and thought. It analyses each sense and the “common sense” that unifies perceptions, and claims that the soul is, in a way, all things. Book III introduces the distinction between an intellect that becomes all things and another that makes all things, separable and immortal, whose meaning was debated for centuries by Greek, Arabic and Latin commentators.