No De motu animalium, Aristóteles recorre ao método analógico na pesquisa que faz acerca da causa comum do movimento, estabelecendo o paradigma do membro articulado, modelo que ele operacionaliza tendo em vista tornar inteligível o caráter dinâmico do movimento dos animais. Contudo, o membro articulado não se apresenta como modelo de uma maneira direta, na verdade, ele é convertido em modelo. Textualmente, o estabelecimento do paradigma, ou modelização, começa em 698a17 e vai até 698b4, incluindo três etapas: a (...) primeira referência às articulações; a geometrização do movimento do membro articulado, que compreende três subdivisões: a comparação da articulação com o centro, a geometrização radical que é a comparação com o diâmetro, e a relativização da comparação geométrica; e por último, a volta à natureza da articulação com o modelo anatômico do membro articulado, o ponto culminante do processo de modelização. No artigo presente, gostaríamos de fazer uma análise das etapas da construção deste paradigma, cujas estratégias metodológicas culminam no modelo anatômico do membro articulado, uma surpreendente imagem em ação para o objeto do De motu, que, paradoxalmente, dá a ver a imobilidade na mobilidade do membro. (shrink)

Available for the first time in paperback, this volume contains text with translation of De Motu Animalium, Aristotle's attempt to lay the groundwork for a general theory of the explanation of animal activity, along with commentary and interpretive essays on the work.

El artículo contiene una exposición general del De Motu Animalium que se ordena a mostrar que no puede usarse esta obra como fundamento de la la opinión según la cual el silogismo práctico culmina en una acción y no en un juicio. Se refuta, además, la tesis contraria, del modo como la defienden diversos autores, tales como Martha Nussbaum, Elizabeth Anscombe y Alejandro Vigo. This paper contains a general exposition of De Motu Animalium , particularly chapters (...) 6-11. The goal is to prove that this Aristotelian work cannot be used to ground the opinion according to which practical syllogism concludes in an action and not in a judgment. The contrary thesis, as it is held by several authors such as Elizabeth Anscombe, Martha Nussbaum, and Alejandro Vigo, is refuted. (shrink)

Aristotle’s De motu animalium (hereafter MA) has enjoyed a curious fate: while it remained largely at the margins of the ancient critical engagement with Aristo.

The volumes of the Symposium Aristotelicum have become essential reference works for the study of Aristotle. In this twentieth volume, ten renowned scholars of ancient philosophy offer a running commentary on Aristotle's De motu animalium. It is in this text, one of his most intriguing works, that Aristotle sets out the general principles of animal locomotion. A philological and a philosophical introduction sketch the current state of research on this treatise, situating current thought in the context of three (...) decades of scholarly debates. The nine contributed essays together comment on each chapter of the Aristotelian text, discussing in detail the philosophical issues that are raised across the different sections of the text. Comprehensive analyses of Aristotle's doctrines and arguments, as well as critical discussion of rival interpretations, make this volume a valuable resource for scholars of Aristotle. The present volume also includes a newly reconstructed Greek text with a facing English translation by Benjamin Morison. (shrink)

Thema der kleinen und bemerkenswerten Spätschrift des Aristoteles ist die Beantwortung der Frage ›Wie bewegt die Seele den Körper?‹, d.h. der Frage nach dem Auslöser der Selbstbewegung von Lebewesen. Dies beinhaltet alle gewollten oder auch ungewollten Akte der Selbstbewegung animalischer und menschlicher Organismen. Damit steht die Schrift in der Mitte zwischen der allgemeinen Bewegungslehre des Aristoteles und der in seinen früheren Schriften abgehandelten Biologie und Psychologie, auf die er hier häufig zurückgreift. In 'De motu' wird eine umfassende biologische Theorie (...) des animalischen und menschlichen Handelns formuliert, die handlungstheoretischen und physiologischen Fragen gleichermaßen gerecht zu werden sucht. Auch äußert Aristoteles sich darin erstmals zum berühmten ›angeborenen Pneuma‹, in dem er eine vermittelnde Instanz in der Bewegungsübertragung sieht. Diese Ausgabe bietet die Schrift, die seit der Edition von Martha Nussbaum (1978) in den Blickpunkt der Forschung geraten ist, in einer Neuedition des griechischen Originaltextes von Oliver Primavesi und in einer neuen deutschen Übersetzung und Erläuterung von Klaus Corcilius. Der griechische Text konnte an vielen Stellen durch die Heranziehung des zweiten selbstständigen Überlieferungszweiges verbessert werden, der allen früheren Herausgebern unbekannt geblieben war und den Oliver Primavesi 2011 auf dem 19. Symposium Aristotelicum zu 'De motu' vorgestellt hat. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Notes and Discussions ARISTOTLE'S "DE MOTU ANIMALIUM" AND THE SEPARABILITY OF THE SCIENCES In contrast to Plato's vision of a unified science of reality and with a profound effect on subsequent natural science and philosophy, Aristotle urges in the Posterior Analytics and elsewhere that scientific knowledge is to be pursued in limited, separable domains, each with its own true and necessary first principles for the explanation of (...) a discrete range of phenomena, that is, accepted observations and beliefs, from which its investigations are launched (An. Pr. 46al7ff.; An. Post. 74b25, 76a26-3 o, 84b14-18, 88a31; Cael. 3o6a6ff.; Gen. An. 748a7ff.). In an early introduction to a course of lectures on the natural sciences, Aristotle also indicates the order in which those sciences ought to be presented (Mete. 338a2o-~9, 339a5-9; cf. Cael. 268al6, Part. An. 644b~2ff.). The plan is to start with a general discussion of change and motion, then progress to studies of specific natural phenomena, ending with the many species of plants and animals. In the theory of demonstration in Posterior Analytics 1, which is concerned with the organization, justification, and teaching of a finished science, Aristotle maintains that terms cannot ordinarily cross genera; for example, geometry cannot provide demonstrations of truths of arithmetic or aesthetics. Demonstration of a theorem of some one science by means of another can be accomplished when and only when the sciences are related as "subordinate " to "superior" (75b14-17), for example, as harmonics to arithmetic or optics to geometry. A superior science may supply the "reason" for a "fact" known to obtain in the subordinate science (78b34-79a6). Evidently at least part of what he has in mind is the relation between pure and applied sciences.' Aristotle's practice as well as a number of methodological remarks ' See ThomasAquinas,In Post. An. 50.1,15.131, 50.1.25,as wellasJ. Barnes'snoteson An. Post. 78b34,in Aristotle'sPosteriorAnalytics (Oxford:OxfordUniversityPress,1975).For relevant background see Ian Mueller,"Ascendingto Problems:Astronomyand Harmonicsin Republic VII," inJohn Anton,ed., Scienceand the Sciencesin Plato (Albany:StateUniversityof NewYork Press, 1979). [65] 66 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY suggest also that the strictures of the Posterior Analytics are not intended to prohibit the heuristic use of material from other disciplines in research (see e.g., Top. 1.14; Part An. 639b17ff., 641a6-14, 642alo-14, 645b15-2o; Ph. 192b8-34, 199a8-21, 199a33-b5). The requirements for science laid down here are very strict, and it is sometimes maintained that Aristotle violates them himself to some degree in other works, but it is not usually believed that he ever denies the separability of the sciences in general. Martha C. Nussbaum has recently presented a lively challenge to this concensus? She argues that Aristotle's late, little known work De Motu Animalium represents a radical but "deliberate and fruitful" rejection of his earlier philosophy of science as enunciated in the Organon and not seriously questioned in other, subsequent writings. Her claim is that in his mature thought about the sciences Aristotle arrives at a significantly "less departmental and more flexible picture of scientific study" (p. 113) and comes to hold that "no inquiry is genuinely separable from a whole group of interlocking studies, and no being can be extensively studied without an account of its placement in the whole of nature" (p. 164). Nussbaum's conclusion is probably not intended to be as Platonic as it may appear at first blush, for she seems actually to be speaking only of connections between sciences of different substances. There is no suggestion that the study of beauty or health or geometry, say, is on a par with the sciences of substances. Nor does she suggest that Aristotle wavers in his conviction that there are fundamental cleavages between the practical and theoretical sciences, which will make a full-blown science of ethics-politics look very different from the demonstrative science of meteorology, for example. Nevertheless, even if limited to the natural sciences of substances, her claim remains an important and interesting one. She holds, more specifically, that Aristotle departs from his earlier position as follows: (1) He recognizes that the biological study of various modes of local motion... (shrink)

This is the first full-length commentary on De Motu Animalium since Albertus Magnus's thirteenth century treatise, De Principiis Motus Progresivi. Several paraphrases, and numerous editions, have appeared over the years, but a general belief, particularly in the nineteenth century, that MA was not an authentic work of Aristotle's, and doubt about the overall importance of this brief and cryptic work, had served to discourage more ambitious projects. Scholarly opinion changed in this century, and the authenticity of MA is (...) now generally accepted. Nussbaum relates this history, establishes MA's authenticity beyond a doubt, and finds ample philosophical reason for bringing her--and our--attention to a full-length commentary. For MA, as she shows, is a treatise not only in biology, but also in cosmology, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, theory of action, and practical reasoning. (shrink)

El propósito en este artículo es mostrar que, a pesar del juicio lapidario de algunos estudiosos de las últimas décadas respecto del interés filosófico del bizantino Miguel de Éfeso, es posible encontrar aspectos relevantes en sus lecturas e interpretaciones de Aristóteles. Argumentaré que el comentario de Miguel al _De motu animalium_ merece ser tratado seriamente. En la medida en que Miguel a veces emplea un modelo conceptual estoico para explicar Aristóteles, propone una idea nueva sobre cómo entender la teoría (...) aristotélica de la acción. Las interpretaciones del texto aristotélico por parte de Miguel no son meras repeticiones; en algunos pasajes se advierten desarrollos que van más allá de Aristóteles, aun cuando presuponen premisas aristotélicas bastante claras. (shrink)

In this article I explore certain modeling in Aristotle's zoological work. In particular, I am interested in the type of theoretical schemes in which Aristotle does not claim anatomical or physiological precision because they refer to more than one genus of animals or their parts or activities. On the one hand, I analyse the triaxial scheme of the faculties of animals in the De Incessu Animalium 4, in which the dimensions are defined not by their position but by a (...) function. On the other hand, I examine the diagram of the De Motu Animalium 9, in which Aristotle concludes that the material middle of the animal, the heart, cannot originate simultaneous movements, so there must be something that moves without being moved. I believe that this model also distinguishes its elements not by their positions but their functions. The geometric terms assigned in each case account for certain functions of animals, presenting a double value of the analogy: between the animal domain and the geometric one, and granting the necessary generality to capture the similarity between different genus within the animal domain itself. (shrink)

In Descartes’s reformulation of natural philosophy, two aspects of what came to be known as the mechanical philosophy were intimately joined: mechanism as an ontology of nature, according to which all natural things had only ‘mechanical’ properties; and mechanism as a method of explanation. One could, and many philosophers did, adopt mechanism as a method of explanation without adopting a mechanistic ontology. I examine two successors of Descartes who did just that, and one who did not. Giovanni Alfonso Borelli in (...) his De motu animalium and Charles Perrault in his Mécanique de animaux propose and argue for a variety of mechanical accounts of the operations of animals, in particular of their muscles. They reject, however, the Cartesian reduction of animal souls to mechanical forces; the principle of animal motion for them remains a non-mechanical soul. Pierre Sylvain Régis in his Cours entier de philosophie follows Descartes in taking the ‘physical cause’ of motion in animals to be the fermentation of blood in the heart, and thus denies animal souls any role in his physiology. That he can do so while taking over, sometimes word for word, Perrault’s accounts of animal motion shows that mechanistic explanation and mechanistic ontology could easily part company. (shrink)

The notion of an automaton, as it is employed in the natural philosophy of Descartes and his closest followers, has three main components. None of them is new; what is new in early modern philosophy is the uses to which this old notion is put, and the idiosyncrasies into which its components are combined by subsequent philosophers. The thaumaturgic element is never entirely suppressed; but the more down-to-earth usage exemplified in antiquity by Aristotle’s references predominates. The automaton is quite often (...) the opposite of wonderful: phenomena that might excited wonder are proved to be unworthy of it, just by showing that they are the productions of an automaton. The automaton is, first of all, a machine, and therefore an artifact, human or (if the metaphor becomes literal) divine. It offers a model of intelligibility—to use Peter Dear’s term—for a certain class of natural phenomena, namely those we find in living things. But Descartes wants from it something more. In Descartes’ usage, a machine is that which makes itself available not just to “mechanical” explanation, but to a complete explanation, an explanation that makes all others superfluous. Not all machines, of course, are automata. Two further components figure in the notion. One is that automata are typically imitative. From the automata thaumata of Aristotle’s De Motu animalium to the nymphs of Salomon de Caus’s fountains, many automata are likenesses, partaking both of the iconic (to use Peirce’s term) and the symbolic. Moving sculptures proceed moving pictures by over two thousand years. They succeeded if they convinced their audiences that they could do what their prototypes did—where the doing is typically restricted to some few sorts of act. The wind-up mouse skitters across the floor like a real mouse; but it does not eat, nor does it seek the.. (shrink)

"The aim of this paper is to inscribe the argument on the Practical Syllogism of De motu animalium, chapter 7, in its immediate context. Now this framework is by no means a logical one. The De motu is a psychological or zoological treatise, whose scope belongs to natural philosophy. Moreover De motu's Practical Syllogism cannot be restricted to practical, i.e. anthropological, cases, like akrasia. It is inserted in a physiological development regarding the biological explanation of animal (...) emotions, reactions and actions. Thus, the necessity of the conclusion – here the action itself – does not mean that the conditions for acting are reducible to propositions or to logical connections: rather it stands for the necessity that governs the agent-patient relation in animal movement.". (shrink)

Depuis maintenant plus d'un siècle, soit depuis la parution en 1863 de la monographie de J. Freudenthal, la tendance générale des interprèetes qui se sont intéressés à l'imagination chez Aristote aura été, sans conteste, de privilégier l'examen du De anima III 3 et de certains textes des Parva naturalia afin de rendre compte de son rôle à l'intérieur de la psychologie aristotélicienne. Ce faisant, on a laissé quelque peu dans l'ombre, consciemment ou non, peu importe, la fonction de l'imagination dans (...) l'explication du mouvement animal et de l'action humaine qu'Aristote nous a léguée essentiellement dans le De motu animalium et le De anima III 7, 9–11. Certes, étant donné l'importance de l'imagination en ces questions, certains exégètes n'ont pas manqué de s'y arrêter, mais la rareté des commentaires sur ces sujets, tout spéecialement le premier, et la possibilité d'apporter de nouveaux éclaircissements nous incitent àen reprendre l'examen. Nous traiterons d'abord du rôle de l'imagination dans l'explication du mouvement animal, puis dans celle, plus complexe, de l'action proprement humaine où l'imagination, de prime abord, pourrait sembler avoir une fonction préjudiciable à l'action réfléchie. Pour effacer ce soupçon à l'égard de la pensée du Stagirite, que bien des philosophes auront manifesté dans l'histoire, il nous faudra, notamment, discuter la question du bien apparent et du bien comme tel en regard de l'imagination délibérative. (shrink)

The opinion according to which Thomas Aquinas was the original owner of ms. Vat. lat. 718 has proved wrong and cannot serve anymore for dating the codex before Thomas’ departure to Italy . The Parisian tradition of De progressu animalium and De motu animalium integrated Moerbeke’s two translations not only into the Aristotelian Corpus recentius of zoological treatises, but also into the corpora recentiora of the parua. It is probable that De historia animalium was augmented with (...) Book X in a secondary stage of its circulation. As far as the university tradition of De motibus animalium et aliorum paruorum is concerned, not all questions regarding three successive exemplaria, and more precisely those of the exact contents, composition and number of peciae are definitively resolvable for the moment. R.-A. Gauthier’s position regarding the composition of the exemplar of the psychological parua in Np3 must be corrected after new examination of the manuscript witnesses . Several Italian witnesses do not depend on the university text, but regularly attest to the existence of independent traditions. Moerbeke’s Greek codex used in his first version of the Latin translation has some similarities with the Greek codex used by the Anonymous whose translation became the basis of Albert the Great’s De principiis motus processivi. This latter Greek codex is not preserved, but it had some striking similarities with ms. Firenze Laur. LXXXVII.21, which originated in the monastery of Hagios Nikalaos in Casole near Otranto. Moerbeke’s Greek model was certainly not identical with that used by the Anonymous and was, indeed, obviously better. (shrink)

In De Partibus Animalium I Aristotle sets out his philosophy of biology, discussing cause, necessity, soul, genus, and species, definition by logical division, and general methodology. In De Generatione Animalium I he applies his hylomorphic philosophy to the problem of animal reproduction. The translation is close, and includes passages from De Generatione Animalium II which complete Aristotle's theory of reproduction. The notes interpret Aristotle's arguments and discuss his views on major issues such as natural teleology. The original (...) edition was published in 1972. (shrink)