Ancient Perspectives on Aristotle's De anima

introduction

introduction Gerd Van Riel Arnis Rītups Aristotle’s treatise On the Soul figures among the most influential texts in the intellectual history of the West. It is the first systematic treatise on the nature and functioning of the (human) soul, presenting Aristotle’s authoritative analyses of, among others, sense perception, imagination, memory, and intellect. The ongoing debates on this difficult work continue the commentary tradition that dates back to antiquity. This volume offers a selection of papers, exploring the ancient perspectives on Aristotle’s De anima, from Aristotle’s earliest successors through the Aristotelian Commentators at the end of Antiquity. It constitutes a twin publication with a volume entitled Medieval Perspectives on Aristotle’s De anima (to be published in the Series “Philosophes Médiévaux”, Peeters Publ.), both volumes appearing to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the De Wulf-Mansion Centre for Ancient, Medieval and Renaissance philosophy at K.U. Leuven and U.C. Louvain. 1. fifty years of research in the de wulf-mansion centre The texts gathered in this volume are, for the most part, reworked versions of papers presented at a conference Soul and Mind: Ancient and Medieval Perspectives on the De anima, organized in February 2007 to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the De Wulf-Mansion Centre.¹ The present members of this Centre deemed it appropriate to bring together scholars from around the world to present new insights in a subject matter on which the Louvain Institute of Philosophy, to which the Centre belongs, has focused its attention from the start. As Carlos Steel, the former director of the De Wulf-Mansion Centre, noted in his welcoming speech, Aristotle’s De anima was part and parcel of the neo-Thomistic educational agenda of Cardinal Désiré Mercier, due to whose efforts the Institut Supérieur de Philosophie itself was established as an independent institution in 1889. Cardinal Mercier’s desire to oppose the dominant trends of positivism during the second half of the 19th century led to the idea of combining the study of Thomism (encouraged by pope Leo xiii) with modern experimental psychology. This agenda made¹ See the report on this conference by Arnis Rītups, in Bulletin de Philosophie Médiévale 49 (2007), 271-304. vi gerd van riel – arnis rtups Aristotle’s De anima a convenient point of departure for a complex educational programme in which psychology was conceived as the heart of philosophy.² Since those days, the study of Aristotle’s works, and of ancient and medieval philosophy in general, explored new fields and grounds, and the De Wulf-Mansion Centre itself made an important contribution to the reassessment of the role of the history of philosophy in studying philosophy. The Centre was founded in 1956 by Fernand van Steenberghen, Maurice Giele, Gerard Verbeke, and Herman Leo van Breda. From the start, this research centre set as its principal aim to facilitate and enhance research in ancient and medieval philosophy, with particular interest in the transition and continuity of the history of philosophy in these two periods. The centre took its name from Maurice De Wulf (1867-1947), one of the pioneers of the historiography of medieval philosophy, and Augustin Mansion (1882-1966), an outstanding scholar of Aristotelianism. In 1969, at the time of the division of the Catholic University of Louvain, two centres were born, each to continue at its own university the mission entrusted by the founders: the “De Wulf-Mansioncentrum” (hereafter dwmc) at Leuven and the “Centre De Wulf-Mansion” (hereafter cdwm) at Louvain-la-Neuve. These two centres retain their tight bonds of collaboration, to which the joint organization of the 50th anniversary celebration bears witness. The cdwm has always held on to its strong tradition of research in medieval philosophy, focusing on Ps.-Dionysius, Cusanus, and Eckhart, and editing the series Philosophes Médiévaux. Special attention is also paid to medieval Arabic philosophy (Avicenna and the later tradition). On the ancient side, Plato, Aristotle and the Latin Stoics are the main research areas, in connection to which the centre edits the series Aristote. Traductions et Études. The cdwm has also had a close collaboration with the Centre de traitement électronique de documents (cetedoc ), which has developed a lot of electronic tools for lexicographical research. Since 1973 the dwmc has been the home of the Aristoteles Latinus, the international project to edit the medieval Latin translations of Aristotle’s works, supported by the Union Académique Internationale. In this...