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Aristotle applies his theory of hylomorphism to living things. He defines a soul as that which makes a living thing alive. [19] Life is a property of living things, just as knowledge and health are. [20] Therefore, a soul is a form—that is, a specifying principle or cause—of a living thing. [21]
Aristotle holds that the soul (psyche, ψυχή) is the form, or essence of any living thing; it is not a distinct substance from the body that it is in. It is the possession of a soul (of a specific kind) that makes an organism an organism at all, and thus that the notion of a body without a soul , or of a soul in the wrong kind of body, is ...
Aristotle's ontology places the universal (katholou) in particulars (kath' hekaston), things in the world, whereas for Plato the universal is a separately existing form which actual things imitate. For Aristotle, "form" is still what phenomena are based on, but is "instantiated" in a particular substance.
Aristotle begins by raising the question of the seat of life in the body ("while it is clear that [the soul's] essential reality cannot be corporeal, yet manifestly it must exist in some bodily part which must be one of those possessing control over the members") and arrives at the answer that the heart is the primary organ of soul, and the central organ of nutrition and sensation (with which ...
This stronger sense is mainly said of the potentials of living things, although it is also sometimes used for things like musical instruments. [7] Throughout his works, Aristotle clearly distinguishes things that are stable or persistent, with their own strong natural tendency to a specific type of change, from things that appear to occur by ...
Attempts to classify living things, too, began with Aristotle. Modern classification began with Carl Linnaeus's system of binomial nomenclature in the 1740s. Living things are composed of biochemical molecules, formed mainly from a few core chemical elements.
All living things have nutrition and growth as a work, all animals (according to Aristotle's definition of animal) have perception as part of their work, but what work is particularly human? The answer according to Aristotle is that it must involve reason , including both being open to persuasion by reasoning, and thinking things through.
(The word "nature" for Aristotle applies to both its potential in the raw material and its ultimate finished form. In a sense this form already existed in the material: see potentiality and actuality.) Whereas modern physics looks to simple bodies, Aristotle's physics took a more general viewpoint, and treated living things as exemplary.