Aristotle's "De Motu Animalium" (review)

92 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY In addition, she provides ample discussion of scholarly opinion on the problems she treats. Her prose style is fashioned with a pleasing combination of clarity and grace. The book is a model of organization, with chapters clearly divided into sections, and conclusions anticipated long before they are reached. The technique of anticipation is perhaps carried to a fault, for the reader is so well informed about the direction in which arguments are tending that he feels little suspense. The primary fault of this book, however, is overstatement. Keuls frequently argues from evidence that is ambiguous or indirect. Although her interpretations are sometimes possible, at other times they are strained. Occasionally she resorts even to the argumentum ex silentio. Readers will not be persuaded to many of Keuis's conclusions; nonetheless, they will find her work quite useful for its collection of evidence, its discussion of scholarly literature, and its exposition of problems. Even when Keuls's theses are not completely convincing they frequently offer interesting hypotheses for speculation. Keuls's study reveals, partly in spite of itself, how little unambiguous evidence there is for Plato's attitude toward painting. The book is very well produced, though there is at least one serious mistake: at page 86, line 17, '~just" and "unjust" are transposed. W. JosEph CVM~INS Old Dominion University Aristotle. Aristotle's "De Motu Animalium." Text with translation, commentary, and interpretive essays by Martha Craven Nussbaum. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978. Pp. xxiii + 43o. $3o.oo. This interesting and thorough presentation of an unduly neglected treatise contributes to several important problems in Aristotle generally. The text is soundly based on a new collation of the Greek manuscripts and modern editions. The translation is correct and lucid, supported by a well-researched commentary. The essays, which occupy half the book and do not demand knowledge of Greek, analyze the main philosophical issues and show how they fit into the mainstream of Aristotle. It has been this question of orthodoxy that has caused the neglect. The De Motu Animalium is a brief, systematized textbook of the Lyceum, and some have thought it post-Aristotelian. It teaches how intentionality in animals is translated physiologically into action. Although most of its arguments are also found in other treatises, it contains two novelties: it says that there must be a single unmoved source of the soul's action, in the heart, and that there imagination and desire cause a disturbance of pneuma, which transmits motions to the limbs. Its authenticity has been doubted because it seems to say that the soul is only in the heart, contrary to Aristotle's hylomorphic theory that soul is the functional state of the body throughout the limbs, and also because it gives to pneuma an unusual role that is associated more with the Stoics and the post-Aristotelian medical schools. Moreover, it uses interdisciplinary arguments, drawn from physics, cosmology, and biology, and this has been thought to contradict Aristotle's insistence that the principles of one science cannot be transferred to another. BOOK REVIEWS 93 It is important, therefore, to know whether the De Motu Animalium is genuine, and Nussbaum produces many good arguments for it. In Essay 2 especially she shows the inner coherence of the treatise and its essential dependence upon the interdisciplinary approach, which she accordingly suggests is a deliberate move by Aristotle against his earlier prohibition. I doubt whether even this concession is necessary, for the De Motu Animalium's argument does not transfer principles in an analogical or equivocal way; it invokes the principle of an unmoved mover in the same mechanical sense in which it is used in the Physics. Again, Nussbaum has accepted too easily the statement that the soul is only in the heart (which admittedly would contradict Gen. An. 2. 734b25 ff. and the whole theory of De Anima). There is only one place where this is said, at De Motu Animalium 7o3a37; in all eight other places in this context from 7o2a21 Aristotle is speaking not of all soul but of the origin of soul's action, and to say that this origin is in the heart is unobjectionable (Gen. An. 2. 74oa3...