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On the Soul (Greek: Περὶ Ψυχῆς, Peri Psychēs; Latin: De Anima) is a major treatise written by Aristotle c. 350 BC. [1] His discussion centres on the kinds of souls possessed by different kinds of living things, distinguished by their different
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]
Thus any creature, whether generated sexually from parents or spontaneously through the interaction of vital heat and elemental matter, was dependent on the proportions of pneuma and the various elements which Aristotle believed comprised all things. [20] While Aristotle recognized that many living things emerged from putrefying matter, he ...
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 ...
For Aristotle, the soul is the form of a living being. Because all beings are composites of form and matter, the form of living beings is that which endows them with what is specific to living beings, e.g. the ability to initiate movement (or in the case of plants, growth and transformations, which Aristotle considers types of movement). [ 115 ]
Aristotle says, for example, that the ratio 2:1, and number in general, is the formal cause of the octave. Efficient, or agent The efficient or moving cause of a change or movement. This consists of things apart from the thing being changed or moved, which interact so as to be an agency of the change or movement.
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 .
The classification of living things into animals and plants is an ancient one. Aristotle (384–322 BC) classified animal species in his History of Animals, while his pupil Theophrastus (c. 371 –c. 287 BC) wrote a parallel work, the Historia Plantarum, on plants. [7]