Life's Form: Late Aristotelian Conceptions of the Soul - Hardcover

Des Chene, Dennis

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0801437636 ISBN 13: 9780801437632

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2000

Synopsis

Dennis Des Chene explores how Western philosophers understood life and the soul in the early modern period before Descartes radically changed how the universe was conceived. Life's Form is a detailed analysis of the often overlooked work of the Jesuit commentators on Aristotle whose writings dominated Western European science and the academy until the mechanistic revolution. Des Chene considers the work of scholastic writers such as Suárez and the Coimbrans, who provided thorough and sometimes profound studies of Aristotle's definitions of the soul and of life.Life's Form is not restricted only to questions relevant to the human case, such as the immortality of the soul. Des Chene analyzes what might be called the protobiology of late Aristotelians: the theory of living things in general, of their powers, and of the relation between soul and body in all organisms. His mastery of doctrinal subtlety offers insight into conceptual issues of renewed relevance to the philosophy of biology.

About this title

Review

"Life's Form is that rarest of books: an important contribution to advanced scholarship on its subject that is thoroughly accessible to nonspecialists. It immerses its readers in the world of the sixteenth- to seventeenth-century scientia de anima, within which, and out of which, emerges Descartes's decidedly non-Aristotelian conception of the body-soul relation that has haunted us ever since. We are treated to lengthy, elegant translations of the Latin texts of the leading Jesuit philosophers of the period. . . . but always accompanied in footnotes by the full Latin text. . . . When reading this volume one truly feels the importance of answering these problems for these thinkers and the power of the intellects that are grappling with them."―James G Lennox. Isis, Vol. 93, No. 1 (2002)

"He once again offers a rich display of erudition, kept within bounds by an unusually lucid and unpretentious style."―Cees Leijenhorst, Nijmegen University, The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 52 No. 208, July 2002

"Des Chene is an exceptional author: his writing is witty and vivid, and he is prodigiously learned. His references span the history of philosophy and science, largely centered on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but frequently going all the way back to the ancients and all the way forward to the likes of Fodor and Block. . . . This is a book well worth reading."―Robert Pasnau, University of Colorado, The Philosophical Review 111:2, April 2002

"Dennis Des Chene has trawled the natural-philosophy and metaphysics literature on matter theory and the relation between the mind and the body, offering a thorough and sophisticated discussion of individuation and differentiation of plants, animals, and human beings in late scholastic thought. In particular, his finely tuned sense of the complexity and sheer range of views on what it is that marks the intellect out from the body puts his discussion well ahead of everything else in the area."―Stephen Gaukroger, University of Sydney

"I do not know what to praise more: Dennis Des Chene's treatment of late scholastic philosophy, which is notoriously difficult and abstruse, or his discussion of Descartes, which is very illuminating. Des Chene is uncommonly clear, often clarifying difficult issues by means of references to actual discussions without being anachronistic. It is certainly a very original work."―Theo Verbeek, University of Utrecht

Edition details

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0801437636
• ISBN 13: 9780801437632
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 240