De Anima is Aristotle's analysis of the soul as the principle of life — the form of a living body — with a graduated treatment of nutritive, sensitive, and intellective faculties.
de-anima
Aristotle's treatise on the soul as the form of a living body, analyzing the faculties of nutrition, sensation, and intellect across plants, animals, and human beings.
Composed during Aristotle's mature period; precise date uncertain.
Introduction
De Anima (Greek Peri Psychēs, literally On the Soul) is Aristotle's treatise on the soul as the principle of life. The Latin title under which it has been read for nearly a thousand years has misled some modern readers: Aristotle is not writing about an immaterial spiritual substance that survives death, but about the form of a living body — the organizing principle that makes living things alive and accounts for the activities distinctive of plants, animals, and humans.
De Anima is the foundational text of Western philosophy of mind in the broad sense. Its analysis of perception, imagination, and intellect organized scholastic psychology for centuries and remains a continuing reference in contemporary philosophy of mind, especially among those (E.J. Lowe, John Haldane, Edward Feser) who defend broadly hylomorphic accounts of mental life against reductive physicalism.
Form, length, date, language
De Anima is a treatise in three books, totaling approximately 40,000 words in Greek. The composition is conventionally placed in Aristotle's mature period, though precise dating is difficult. The work appears to have undergone some revision; Book I (a critical survey of previous views on the soul) reads as somewhat separate from the more constructive Books II and III. The original language is Attic Greek.
Why it was written
De Anima is the link between Aristotle's general metaphysics and his extensive biological works. The metaphysics establishes the framework of hylomorphism (every substance is a compound of matter and form); the biological works study the various kinds of living things; De Anima provides the bridge by articulating what the form of a living thing is and how the various faculties of life follow from it.
The specific intellectual context is the dispute with two earlier traditions. Against the materialist Pre-Socratics (Empedocles, Democritus), Aristotle argues that the soul cannot be a material substance among others; against the Platonist tradition, he argues that the soul is not a separable substance that merely inhabits a body but is the form that makes a body the body it is. The position is sometimes called moderate hylomorphism about the soul: the soul is real, distinct from matter, but inseparable from the living body it forms.
Structure and argument
Book I. Critical survey of previous accounts of the soul (the Pre-Socratics, Plato). Aristotle catalogues the puzzles and the inadequacies of inherited views before setting out his own position.
Book II. The constructive account. The soul is defined as the first actuality of a natural body that has life potentially (412a27–28). The definition is technical: a natural body (one organized by nature, not artifact) that has life potentially (capable of the activities of life) has, when alive, its first actuality — the form that makes it actually alive. The soul is therefore not a thing inside the body but the principle by which the body is alive at all.
Aristotle then analyzes the soul as having graduated faculties: the nutritive faculty (shared by all living things), the sensitive faculty (shared by animals), the locomotive faculty (shared by many animals), and the intellective faculty (distinctive of humans). Each higher faculty presupposes the lower ones. Plants have only nutrition and growth; animals add sensation and motion; humans add intellect.
The analysis of sensation (II.5–12) is detailed and influential. Each sense modality is distinguished by its proper object (sight by color, hearing by sound, etc.); the sense organ takes on the form of the sensed object without taking on its matter, which is how perception is possible.
Book III. The higher cognitive faculties. Aristotle distinguishes imagination (phantasia), opinion, and intellect. The treatment of intellect (III.4–5) is the most famous and most contested section of the work. Aristotle distinguishes the passive intellect (which receives intelligible forms) from the active intellect (which makes the intelligible actual). The famous passage III.5 contains the brief, compressed remarks on the separability and immortality of the active intellect that generated centuries of medieval commentary and the Latin Averroist controversies.
Key passages
- 403a3–27 — the methodological discussion of whether the soul has parts and how the inquiry should proceed.
- 412a27–413a10 — the technical definition of the soul as the first actuality of a natural body.
- 414b32–415a13 — the doctrine that the higher faculties presuppose the lower.
- 417a20–418a25 — the analysis of sensation as the reception of form without matter.
- 429a10–430a26 — the treatment of intellect, including the famous and contested passages on the active intellect (III.4–5).
- 432a3–12 — the famous observation that the soul is in a way all things.
Reception history
De Anima was the foundational text of Western philosophical psychology for nearly two thousand years. The Greek and Arabic commentary traditions were extensive: Alexander of Aphrodisias's commentary (c. 200 CE) is the foundational ancient treatment; Themistius's paraphrase (fourth century) was widely read in the medieval Latin West; Avicenna and Averroes each produced major commentaries, and Averroes's reading of the active intellect as a single substance shared by all humans generated the Latin Averroist controversies of the thirteenth century.
In the Latin West, Aquinas wrote a major commentary on De Anima and integrated its categories into his Christian metaphysics of the human person. The Aquinian reading — the soul as the form of the body, with the rational soul possessing a degree of independence from matter that allows for personal immortality — became the standard Catholic position and remains so.
The early modern period largely rejected the hylomorphic framework in favor of Cartesian dualism (mind and body as distinct substances) or various materialist alternatives. De Anima receded as a primary text. The twentieth-century revival of Aristotelianism in analytic philosophy, especially around the work of David Wiggins, John Haldane, Edward Feser, and the broader hylomorphist response to reductive physicalism, has restored De Anima to serious philosophical engagement.
Contemporary engagement
Major recent scholarly work includes the Cambridge Companion to Aristotle's De Anima (Mark Shiffman and Christopher Shields, eds.), Christopher Shields's translation and commentary (Oxford, 2016), the Clarendon Aristotle volumes on individual books, and the essays collected in Polansky's Aristotle's De Anima (2007). Active scholarly disputes concern the interpretation of the active intellect (singular or plural, separable or not, identifiable with God or not), the relation between Aristotle's account and contemporary philosophy of mind, the place of De Anima in the broader Aristotelian biology, and the question of whether the hylomorphic account of the soul can be defended in light of contemporary neuroscience.
Further reading
- Aristotle — the author
- Aristotelianism — the tradition
- Metaphysics — the broader metaphysical framework
- Aquinas — the great medieval commentator
- Episteme — the cognitive achievement intellect makes possible
- Form — the metaphysical category the soul instantiates
The foundational text of Western philosophy of mind in the hylomorphic tradition.