Mind and World in Aristotle's De Anima

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sean Kelsey

Why is the human mind able to perceive and understand the truth about reality; that is, why does it seem to be the mind's specific function to know the world? Sean Kelsey argues that both the question itself and the way Aristotle answers it are key to understanding his work De Anima, a systematic philosophical account of the soul and its powers. In this original reading of a familiar but highly compressed text, Kelsey shows how this question underpins Aristotle's inquiry into the nature of soul, sensibility, and intelligence. He argues that, for Aristotle, the reason why it is in human nature to know beings is that 'the soul in a way is all beings'. This new perspective on the De Anima throws fresh and interesting light on familiar Aristotelian doctrines: for example, that sensibility is a kind of ratio (logos), or that the intellect is simple, separate, and unmixed.

Author(s):  
SUGUNADEVI VEERAN ◽  
S.SANTHIYA

It is knowledge and emotion that haunt human society. From the day the world appeared until the day the world ended, knowledge and emotion existed. According to Thiruvalluvar, knowledge that calms the emotion in his kural. Meyppatu are manifestations of mental consciousness. Tholkkappiyar has numbered the emotions that appear in the human mind in his epic Tholkkappiyam in Chapter Porulathigaaram. He has analyzed the emotions that appear within him in a way that others can know and understand very accurately (Meyppatu). They are eight types of emotions that apply to all human beings in the world. Meyppatu are the expression of human instincts. This dissertation aims to find out how the poetic enlightenment has been manipulated in the poetic epistemology of the numerical facts stated in the economics of Tholkappiam the fact of the matter is that consciousness is an emotional state that paves the way for human happiness. Any living being born into the world wants to be happy. Therefore, the researcher has used the poems of Arivumathi to prove this fact.


2020 ◽  
Vol 111 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-84
Author(s):  
Mary Franklin-Brown

Abstract Through a study of early French romances, especially the Conte de Floire et Blancheflor and Alexandre de Paris’s Roman d’Alexandre, this essay offers a new approach to the automaton in medieval literature. Bruno Latour’s plural ontology, which elaborates on the earlier work of Gilbert Simondon and Étienne Souriau, provides a way to break down the division between the human mind and the world (and hence the mind and the machine), offering a rich understanding of the way in which the beings of technology [TEC], fiction [FIC], and religion [REL] act in concert upon us to inspire our desire for technological fictions.


Author(s):  
James T. Cushing

In antiquity ‘self-evident’ principles were used to argue for the conservation of certain quantities. The concept of quantitative conservation laws, such as those of mass and energy, is of much later origin. Even prior to the development of modern mechanics, symmetries were employed to solve some dynamical problems. The relation between conserved quantities and symmetries has come to play a central role in the physical sciences. Conservation laws may reflect as much about the way the human mind organizes the phenomena of the world as they do about physical reality itself.


Author(s):  
Iris Berent

Do newborns think? Do they know that 3 is greater than 2? Do they prefer right to wrong? What about emotions? Do newborns recognize happiness or anger? If they do, then how are our inborn thoughts and feelings encoded in our bodies? Could they persist after we die? Going all the way back to ancient Greece, human nature and the mind–body link are the topics of age-old scholarly debates. But laypeople also have strong opinions about such matters. Most people believe, for example, that newborn babies don’t know the difference between right and wrong—such knowledge, they insist, can only be learned. For emotions, they presume the opposite—that our capacity to feel fear, for example, is both inborn and embodied. These beliefs are stories we tell ourselves about what we know and who we are. They reflect and influence our understanding of ourselves and others, and they guide every aspect of our lives. In a twist that could have come out of a Greek tragedy, Berent proposes that our errors are our fate. These mistakes emanate from the very principles that make our minds tick: Our blindness to human nature is rooted in human nature itself. An intellectual journey that draws on philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, cognitive science, and Berent’s own cutting-edge research, The Blind Storyteller grapples with a host of provocative questions, from why we are so infatuated with our brains to what happens when we die. The end result is a startling new perspective on our humanity.


Author(s):  
Eric Hobsbawm

This chapter discusses Marxist historiography in the present times. In the interpretation of the world nowadays, there has been a rise in the so-called anti-Rankean reaction in history, of which Marxism is an important but not always fully acknowledged element. This movement challenged the positivist belief that the objective structure of reality was self-explanatory, and that all that was needed was to apply the methodology of science to it and explain why things happened the way they did. This movement also brought together history with the social sciences, therefore turning it into part of a generalizing discipline capable of explaining transformations of human society in the course of its past. This new perspective on the past is a return to ‘total history’, in which the focus is not merely on the ‘history of everything’ but history as an indivisible web wherein all human activities are interconnected.


2009 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 147-153
Author(s):  
Anna Muradova ◽  

The archaic mythology of Celts like the other pagan cosmologic systems is based on binary oppositions e.g. light and darkness, “our world” and the Otherworld. The comparative reconstruction of the basic concepts of the pre-Christian mytho-poetical tradition is in most cases based on the Old Irish text. Nevertheless, Breton folklore texts (often neglected because of their modernity) can be useful for further reconstruction of the opposition “light – dark”, “our world – otherworld”. The fact of the existence of such oppositions like one of the first steps of the human mind on the way of understanding the world and structuring the society was observed by ethnologists, psychologists and comparative linguists.


2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nerijus Stasiulis

In this article I present the outline of Filosofija. Sociogija 30(3) the articles of which I see as mainly centering around the issue of Man as placed and interacting within social, cultural and political contexts. However, the discussion of the social or political is generally nourished by metaphysical or epistemological issues or insights. The human mind deals with the fundamental questions concerning human nature, the existence or the metaphysical structure of the world, the status of cognition in general and science/ technology in particular. The articles merge into a choir signalling the inescapably social and political mode of our consciousness.


Author(s):  
Pablo López

In a radical and philosophical sense, technique is the way of rationally and systematically putting forward an ultimate cause of humanity in the world. Due to the increasing development of techniques in the last two centuries, technique has moved into the limelight of contemporary philosophy. A technological outlook favors some philosophical positions, but it raises perennial questions in a new fashion. Likewise the technique of philosophy is also considered. Philosophy has its own way or method of rational and systematic doing. Of course, there are varied methods in philosophy, but they must share some basic identity in order not to be confused with those not being philosophic. Also, since philosophy cannot examine techniques used by other domains, there cannot be a philosophy of technique without a self-examination of philosophy concerning its own techniques. What is more, our vision both of philosophy of technique and of technique itself corresponds to a vision both of the technique of philosophy and of philosophy itself. In terms of the limits of our human nature in its historical environment, technique can be understood as the historical way that human reason overcomes its limits. Nature and technique can merge and live together, provided that we are open to integrating them within ourselves.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 58-73
Author(s):  
Francesca Brencio

Through this contribution I aim to show how the role of language and metaphors is fundamental to our understanding of reality, affecting the way we ordinarily act and live, and particularly important in facing fears and anguish. This is more evident in these times of the COVID-19 pandemic, where our experiences of language and of the world seem to be characterised mainly by war terminology. Politicians declare themselves at war fighting an invisible enemy and health care workers, who are in direct contact with COVID-19 positive patients, are said to be “fighting” on the “frontlines”. Starting from a philosophical account of the relationship between language, fear and anguish, I aim to show how this narrative is unhelpful, both for society at large and especially for patients and health care workers. While war narratives instil fear, it seems to me that new forms of solidarity and new models of coexistence are required. Since language shapes the way in which we think, live and act, it is important to choose words that encourage people to act responsibly, to cooperate and to overcome the hardships of the COVID19 pandemic together.


Author(s):  
Camelia Marinela Radulescu

Education is characterized by volatility (V), uncertainty (U), complexity (C), and ambiguity (A). The reality of classroom practice shows that change management skills are highly important for both novice and experienced teachers to survive professionally in this context. The purpose of this chapter is to discuss a new set of skills that teachers need to develop during their ITE in order to overcome the constant change when working with a generation that is transforming rapidly the way to build relationships, work, and transfer knowledge. In terms of methodological approach, this chapter seeks theoretical entailment, analyzing teacher education from a new perspective and suggesting possible customized solutions from around the world.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document