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The Development of Aristotelian Psychology and Physiology in Medieval Europe Between 1200 and 1420: Introduction

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The Embodied Soul

Abstract

The chapter is devoted to various aspects of philosophical anthropology in the views of Latin authors of the Later Middle Ages. The boundaries of the period are set by two important historical occurrences: the translation of Aristotelian natural philosophy treatises into Latin at the turn of the thirteenth century and the early signs of crisis in scholastic philosophy precipitating the rejection of the pre-modern vision of human being as a psychosomatic unity by early modern science. It presents, in a chronological order, the changes and developments in the understanding of mutual relations between the soul and the body. It takes into account not only the areas of interest (reproduction, nutrition, growth, motion, perception, cognition, etc.) but also the forms of the analyzed works (literal commentaries, paraphrases, questions, treatises). Moreover, it pays attention to the way in which those works formed an interlocking chain through two and a half centuries of history with several recurrently crossing trails, some of which were frequented throughout the period, while others were of a more ephemeral character.

This work was supported by the Polish National Science Centre (NCN) grant n. UMO-2016/23/B/HS1/00430.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See Hasse (2000).

  2. 2.

    See Burnett (1996, 37).

  3. 3.

    See McVaugh (2019, 384).

  4. 4.

    See Esteban-Segura (2012, 18–19).

  5. 5.

    See Kurdziałek (1950).

  6. 6.

    See McVaugh (2010).

  7. 7.

    See Galle (2008, 9–11).

  8. 8.

    See De Leemans (2010, 917–918).

  9. 9.

    See Callus (1943, 4).

  10. 10.

    See Shields and Blumberg (1949, xiii–xiv); Callus (1943, 38).

  11. 11.

    There might have been some earlier attempts to comment on at least some of the treatises from the Parva naturalia set. According to an entry from a seventeenth-century catalogue of the Cathedral Library in Beauvais, there was a manuscript containing, among others, glosses on De somno et vigilia and De morte et vita (again, presumably De longitudine et brevitate vitae) by Alfred of Sareshel. This copy, however, did not survive and, if there are some others still extant, they have not been discovered yet. See Omont (1916, 48, n. 143); Callus (1943, 10–11).

  12. 12.

    See De Leemans (2000, 272–360, esp. 275–276).

  13. 13.

    See Wöllmer (2013, 250–251).

  14. 14.

    See Canguilhem (1991).

  15. 15.

    See Freidson (1970).

  16. 16.

    See Daniels (2000, 318).

  17. 17.

    See Engelhardt (1996).

  18. 18.

    See Black (1991, 1996, 2000).

  19. 19.

    See Tellkamp (2016).

  20. 20.

    See Dunne (2003, 320–336).

  21. 21.

    See Ebbesen (2014, 257–341).

  22. 22.

    See Lohr (2013, 127–128). For the list of questions of De somno et De sensu commentaries, see Ebbesen et al. (2015, 66, 96).

  23. 23.

    See Ebbesen (2013, 90–145); Christensen (2015, 93–128). It was followed by a number of anonymous questions originating in the same academic environment. Some of them have been critically edited, see Ebbesen (2015, 128–161).

  24. 24.

    Callus (1943, 38–39 and 45–47).

  25. 25.

    See Marone (1983, 196).

  26. 26.

    See Flint and Rea (2009).

  27. 27.

    See Del Soldato (2020).

  28. 28.

    See McCord Adams and Trifogli (2012).

  29. 29.

    Solère (2018).

  30. 30.

    See O’Boyle (1998, 5–7).

  31. 31.

    See Kitchel (1971, 1977).

  32. 32.

    See Beneduce (2019); De Asúa (1997).

  33. 33.

    See Miteva (2018).

  34. 34.

    See Hoenen (2011).

  35. 35.

    See Pavlíček (2018); Lawn (1993).

  36. 36.

    See Levinas (1961).

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Gensler, M., Mansfeld, M., Michałowska, M. (2022). The Development of Aristotelian Psychology and Physiology in Medieval Europe Between 1200 and 1420: Introduction. In: Gensler, M., Mansfeld, M., Michałowska, M. (eds) The Embodied Soul. Historical-Analytical Studies on Nature, Mind and Action, vol 11. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99453-2_1

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