Introduction: The Study and Reception of Aristotle’s Parva naturalia

Abstract

The thirteen essays that make up the bulk of this volume all began as papers or comments on papers presented at the first Representation and Reality conference in Gothenburg on 6–8 June 2014 (“Cross-Cultural Dialogues: The Parva naturalia in Greek, Arabic and Latin Aristotelianism”). They are perhaps most straightforwardly read as accounts of so many episodes in the history of the ancient and medieval reception of a classical philosophical work, Aristotle’s Parva naturalia. By and large, they can also be read as inquiries into different passages in the development of a specific theme (psycho-physiology, for want of a better term) in the history of ancient and medieval philosophy. For in ancient and medieval times, the reception of classical philosophical works, not least Aristotle’s, was part of the daily business of philosophers, not historians. Each of these accounts (or inquiries) presents original research designed to widen and deepen our understanding of the episode in hand.

1 This Volume

The thirteen essays that make up the bulk of this volume all began as papers or comments on papers presented at the first Representation and Reality conference in Gothenburg on 6–8 June 2014 (“Cross-Cultural Dialogues: The Parva naturalia in Greek, Arabic and Latin Aristotelianism”).¹ They are perhaps most straightforwardly read as accounts of so many episodes in the history of the ancient and medieval reception of a classical philosophical work, Aristotle’s Parva naturalia. By and large, they can also be read as inquiries into different passages in the development of a specific theme (psycho-physiology, for want of a better term) in the history of ancient and medieval philosophy. For in ancient and medieval times, the reception of classical philosophical works, not least Aristotle’s, was part of the daily business of philosophers, not historians. Each of these accounts (or inquiries) presents original research designed to widen and deepen our understanding of the episode in hand.

The contributors to the volume, all recognized experts in their respective fields, were not assigned specific topics for treatment according to any systematic plan; instead, some of them were invited to submit original papers on topics selected at their own discretion and on the basis of their own expertise, whereas others were asked to comment on one or another of these papers. As a result, certain episodes in the history of the reception of the Parva naturalia—typically ones considered by contemporary scholars to be of particular significance—will be found to have captured the attention of more than one contributor; others, alas, are only touched upon in passing or not at all. For the benefit of those readers who legitimately wonder how one or another of these episodes connects with the rest (and what the missing episodes were all about), the following introduction attempts to provide a skeletal outline of the study and reception of the Parva naturalia through the ages, with the bibliographical references necessary for putting flesh on the bones also regarding those parts of the story which are not directly addressed in any of the thirteen essays.

2 Aristotle’s Parva naturalia

For general overviews of the Parva naturalia, see Ross (1955, 1–68); Düring (1966, 560–571); Morel (2000, 9–60). For discussions of their unity, scope and character, see Kahn (1966); Lloyd (1992); van der Eijk (1994, 68–87, 1997); Morel (2006, 2007, 71–89); Johansen (2006); Sassi (2014). See also King (2001, 34–73), which is particularly focused on the theory of nutrition occupying centre stage in Parva nat. 7a–8.

Aristotle’s De sensu et sensibilibus is prefaced with a statement of the relation between the preceding discussion “of the soul as such and of each of its faculties” (evidently the De anima) and the following inquiry, the purpose of which is to establish which functions (πράξεις)² are peculiar to some and which are common to all animals and other living (and thus ensouled) creatures. In this inquiry, Aristotle says, the results of the preceding discussion must be assumed. This is how the new inquiry begins:

It is clear that the main attributes of animals, both those that are common [to all] and those that are peculiar [to some], are common to the soul and the body, for instance, sense perception, memory, spiritedness, appetite and desire in general, and besides these pleasure and pain. Indeed, these belong to practically all animals. But besides them certain attributes are common to all things that partake of life, while others [belong only to] some among the animals. It so happens that the principal among these attributes constitute four pairs of opposites, namely: wakefulness and sleep, youth and old age, inhalation and exhalation, life and death. We must examine what each of these attributes is and which are the causes of their occurrence. But it is also the task of a natural philosopher to discern the first principles of health and disease, since neither health nor disease can exist in things that are bereft of life. This is why pretty much the vast majority of natural philosophers end up in the study of medicine, whereas those among the physicians who pursue their art in a more philosophical way take the study of nature as their starting-point (Sens. 436a6–b1).³

By and large, the programme of study set out in this passage is implemented over the next nine (or eight, if 7a and 7b in the list below are taken together as one) treatises in our standard editions of the corpus aristotelicum. The English and Latin titles of these treatises used in the present volume are as follows:

• 1. On sense perception and sense objects (De sensu et sensibilibus, 436a1–449b3);

• 2. On memory and recollection (De memoria et reminiscentia, 449b3–453b11);

• 3. On sleep and waking (De somno et vigilia, 453b11–458a32);

• 4. On dreams (De insomniis, 458a33–462b11);

• 5. On prophecy in sleep (De divinatione per somnum, 462b12–464b18);

• 6. On longevity and shortness of life (De longitudine et brevitate vitae, 464b19–467b9);

• 7a. On youth and old age (De juventute et senectute) and (7b) On life and death (De vita et morte, 467b10–470b5);

• 8. On respiration (De respiratione, 470b6–480b30).

Various degrees of interconnection between the several treatises are suggested by the existence of a number of transitional passages and cross-references, which also lend partial support to the relative order established in our standard editions.⁴ Especially, each of the series 3–5 and 7a–8 is introduced and concluded as a single inquiry with several parts (Somn. 453b11–24; Div. 464b16–18; Juv. 467b10–12; Resp. 480b21–22). This is also how these two series were mostly treated in the later tradition. In the ancient catalogue of Aristotle’s works composed, perhaps, in the fourth century CE, by an otherwise unknown Ptolemy (surnamed al-Gharīb, “the stranger,” in some Arabic sources), the treatises in the list above are entered as one book on sense perception and sense objects (presumably = 1), one book on memory and sleep (presumably = 2–5),⁵ one book on the longevity and shortness of life of animals (presumably = 6) and one book on life and death (presumably = 7a–8).⁶ Similarly, the Byzantine commentator Michael of Ephesus (early 12th cent.) seems to have conceived of treatises 2–5, 6 and 7a–8 as three separate but closely related works (In Parva nat. 149.8–12; cf. Wendland 1903b, v nn1–2). Indeed, each of the series 3–5 and 6–8 is practically always transmitted en bloc in the Greek manuscripts, and with only a couple of exceptions this is also true of the extended series 2–5.⁷ Treatises 3–5 were also invariably treated and referred to as a single work in the Latin Middle Ages. In this period, however, the other treatises were not so strongly bonded. For instance, the De memoria in the “old translation” (see below) was partly circulated separately and sometimes even regarded as the final section of the De anima (Brumberg-Chaumont 2010, 128–129). Thomas Aquinas, who used the “new translation,” on the other hand, considered the De memoria to be the second part of the De sensu (Gauthier 1985, 1*–2*). Likewise, treatise 6 in the “old translation” (confusingly entitled De vita et morte) was frequently detached from treatises 7a–8, which had only very limited circulation (see further below, Sect. 5).

As for the collection as a whole (1–8), all the treatises included were manifestly thought of as so many parts of a single general inquiry as early as the early third century CE, when Alexander of Aphrodisias correlated all of them except the De insomniis (albeit not in the standard order) with the programme of study outlined by Aristotle in the De sensu passage quoted above (Alexander, In De sensu 5.1–9; 5.28–29; 5.31–6.7; 6.16–19).⁸ In the manuscript tradition, they were mostly transmitted as a set, if not as a series. Of the fifty Greek manuscripts examined by Siwek (1963, esp. xvii–xviii), which range from the tenth to the fifteenth century, thirty contain all of the Parva naturalia, but only rarely in immediate sequence exactly as they are arranged in our standard editions. As a rule the De motu animalium (and occasionally other treatises) is inserted between treatise 5 and treatise 6. Marwan Rashed (2004, esp. 192–193) has pointed out that while two of the exceptions to this rule are apparently the private copies of learned men, and thus, he argues, susceptible to “restructuring,” the remainder are Renaissance manuscripts, supposedly executed under the influence of Western practices; he concludes that there is no support in the ancient Greek manuscript tradition for the standard order without the De motu animalium.⁹ One may object that it is not entirely clear what Western practices are supposed to have induced the fifteenth-century Greek copyists to omit the De motu animalium. In the so-called “corpus vetustius” of Latin translations of Aristotle’s works on natural philosophy (and sometimes including the Metaphysics) compiled, perhaps, in England between 1214 and c. 1230 (Burnett 1996, 36–38), Parva naturalia 1–6 are almost always included, but, apart from treatises 3–5, in no special order. Parva naturalia 7a–8, however, are not part of this corpus (cf. Burnett 1996, 47–50). The “corpus recentius,” which superseded it from the 1260s, frequently exhibits the whole collection in the standard order, after the De anima and before the “zoological” writings, but usually inserts, after the pattern of the Greek tradition, the De motu animalium between treatise 5 and 6.¹⁰ — The designation Parva naturalia seems to have been first used by Giles of Rome (c. 1245–1316).¹¹

Assuming on this and similar evidence that there is some kind of internal unity and external demarcation to the Parva naturalia as a whole, what does it consist in? Do all the treatises study the same unique subject matter, or at least the same unique aspects of the same subject matter? It is clear, Aristotle says in the quoted passage, that the main attributes of animals are “common to the soul and the body.” It is sometimes put forward that such attributes are what the Parva naturalia set out to study and that their being common to the soul and the body is what distinguishes them from the subject matter of other treatises, notably the De anima. The passage from the De anima to the Parva naturalia, according to at least some proponents of this view, leads from psychology proper, with an emphasis on formal aspects (the soul is after all the form of a living organism), to “psycho-physiology,” with more attention devoted to material aspects (and an increasing ratio of physiology from treatises 1–5 to treatises 6–8). Thus the Parva naturalia would also serve as a preparation for the “zoological” treatises, that is, De partibus animalium, De generatione animalium, De incessu animalium, De motu animalium, and perhaps also the Historia animalium.¹² Since it is unclear how an attribute can be “common” to two entities which are not substantially distinct, this view is also at the heart of the now possibly defunct hypothesis that the Parva naturalia represent an earlier, more dualist (or “instrumentalist”), stage in the development of Aristotle’s psychology.¹³

Should we, then, think of the Parva naturalia as Aristotle’s inquiry into such attributes as are common to the soul and the body? I have my doubts. In the sequel to the quoted passage from the De sensu, Aristotle proceeds to explain that the reason it is clear that all the listed attributes are common to the soul and the body is that they all occur “either together with or through sense perception” (436b3–4)—by which he apparently means that they are at least existentially dependent on sense perception—and “sense perception comes to be in the soul through the body” (436b6–7). This seems to be true of most but not all attributes in Aristotle’s first list, which belong exclusively to animals. Leaving aside sense perception itself, memory as well as spiritedness, appetite and desire in general are at least indirectly dependent on it by being essentially correlated with objects of the phantasia (phantasmata), since such objects are directly dependent on it. With pleasure (and presumably pain), however, this is not necessarily the case, since Aristotle allows that there are intellectual pleasures, which are correlated with intelligible objects, and these are not directly dependent on sense perception.¹⁴ So the invocation of sense perception is not sufficient to prove that the main attributes of animals, enumerated in Aristotle’s first list, are common to the soul and the body.

When it comes to the four pairs of opposites in the second list, what we might request is not proof of their belonging to the body as well as to the soul, but rather of their belonging to the soul as well as to the body. Again, such proof would be at hand if they could all be shown to occur “either together with or through sense perception.” But this is clearly impossible. To be sure, it is in Aristotle’s view unqualifiedly true that the first pair of opposites, namely, wakefulness and sleep, is (at least) existentially dependent on sense perception—although his demonstration of this comes only in the De somno et vigilia. As for youth, old age, life and death, however, this can hold at best only for a proper subset of those creatures to which these attributes belong, namely, again, for animals. For, as Aristotle himself has just pointed out (436b11–12), some attributes belong to all living creatures without exception, and therefore also to plants. It would seem to be as the principal among these attributes that youth, old age, life and death are adduced. But plants do not have sense perception. It is true that the remaining two opposites, inhalation and exhalation, do not belong to plants, and not even to all animals (436b12), but again, it is dubious whether they are in any way dependent on sense perception (cf. Freudenthal 1869, 82 n4).

In sum, Aristotle does not seem to do a very good job of convincing us that those attributes of animals (and plants) that are the subject matter of the Parva naturalia are common to the soul and the body. Admittedly, there are certain discrepancies between the lists of attributes in the first chapter of the De sensu and the actual contents of the rest of the Parva naturalia. None of the treatises in the collection deals, for instance, with the subjects of desire, pleasure and pain.¹⁵ We shall come back to desire in a moment.¹⁶ The absence, however, of a study of pleasure and pain in the Parva naturalia might be taken to reinforce the case for those who argue that their subject matter are attributes common to the soul and the body, since, as we have seen, not all pleasure (and presumably not all pain) is necessarily among those attributes. One may note in this connection the way that these two attributes are presented as a sort of addendum to the first list. Conversely, there are other attributes of animals which are undoubtedly common to the soul and the body, such as sexual activity and locomotion, which are treated, if not in the Parva naturalia, at least in the “zoological” works (especially De generatione animalium and De incessu animalium), without being mentioned in the first chapter of the De sensu.¹⁷

Aristotle says on one occasion in the De anima (3.10, 433b19–21) that the instrument by which desire moves the animal should be studied “in connection with the functions common to body and soul.” Since no such study is carried out in the Parva naturalia, it has been thought that he must have in mind one of the “zoological” works, most likely the De motu animalium.¹⁸ But if the functions common to body and soul are specifically studied in the Parva naturalia, this raises the question whether the De motu animalium (and perhaps other “zoological” works) may originally have belonged to this collection.¹⁹ In the Greek manuscripts, as we have seen, this work almost invariably follows Parva nat. 2–5. In some of them the De divinatione ends with the announcement of the De motu animalium (464b18a, marked as an interpolation by Ross but retained by Siwek). Michael of Ephesus was also of the opinion that the natural position of the De motu animalium is after treatise 5 (and before treatise 6), since, as he said, impulse and desire, which are causes of animal movement, follow phantasia, a prominent theme in treatises 2–5 (In De an. mot. 103.2–14; cf. 129.4–5).²⁰ His opinion, if not his stated reason for it, was shared by several Latin medieval commentators from the mid-thirteenth century onwards (see De Leemans 2010). And, as we have already seen, it corresponds to the order usually followed in the “corpus recentius.”²¹

So the fact that Aristotle seems to locate his study of the functions common to body and soul to the De motu animalium rather than to the Parva naturalia as we know them is in itself no obstacle to thinking that this study belongs to the Parva naturalia. And it may of course well be the case that the Parva naturalia study attributes that are in fact common to the soul and the body, even if Aristotle’s argument falls conspicuously short of proving that they are. But it seems reasonable to take the perfunctoriness of Aristotle’s argument as an indication that, even if these attributes are in fact common to the soul and the body, it is not because they are common to the soul and the body that they are studied in the Parva naturalia.

An even stronger indication to the same effect is provided by the following consideration. One problematic feature of the view that Aristotle in the Parva naturalia turns his attention to attributes that are common to the soul and the body is that it seems to presuppose that Aristotle in the De anima focuses on attributes that are not common to the soul and the body, but rather peculiar to the soul. But he does not. Firstly, because he does not deal (at least not in a programmatic fashion) with attributes of the soul in the De anima. He deals, as he says in the first lines of the De sensu (436a1–2), “with the soul as such and with each of its faculties.” Secondly, because he also does not deal (at least not in a programmatic fashion) with any psychic faculty not connected to a body there. The reason for this is that the De anima is a work on natural philosophy, and for the purposes of natural philosophy the soul is defined as the form, or actuality, of a living organism. Consequently any psychic activity or passivity, in so far as it falls within the domain of natural philosophy, necessarily involves a living organism. It may reasonably be objected that there is an exception, namely intellectual thought (τὸ νοεῖν, νόησις), which Aristotle does believe is unconnected to any bodily organ (De an. 3.4, 429a22–27). But if it is true, as Aristotle seems to think it is, that all intellectual thought in humans involves phantasmata (which are dependent on sense perception), then even the faculty of thought (νοῦς) in humans is inextricably bound up with the body (see De an. 1.1, 403a3–b19; 3.7, 431a14–17; 3.8, 432a3–10; Mem. 1, 449b30–450a9).

“The soul as such” is only conceptually separate from the body, in the sense that the psychic activities can be placed within brackets in a discussion of the faculties that enable them. But the activities themselves are always common to the soul and the body. That the De anima studies “the soul as such” only means that it studies in abstracto the faculties (or “parts”) which enable those activities (and affections) that constitute the subject matter of the Parva naturalia (as well as of most of the “zoological” treatises). It is true that these faculties “enable” the activities and affections of living organisms in more than one way: they are their efficient as well as formal and final causes (De an. 2.4, 415b8–27). On the other hand, the faculties cannot be actualized without bodily organs. What is more, even an abstract study of the faculties of the soul must to some extent involve preliminary investigations into the activities of the soul, for the faculties can only be distinguished by reference to the activities (activities are prior in definition), and thus “the attributes contribute a great deal to the knowledge of the essence” (De an. 1.1, 402b21–22). As far as natural philosophy is concerned, these activities are common to the soul and the body. If there are any activities that are peculiar to the soul, the study of these belongs to a different science altogether. Strictly speaking, it does not even fall within the scope of the De anima to discuss whatever faculties might enable such activities. Indeed, Aristotle is notoriously vague, in the De anima, about whether such a faculty even exists or not. The upshot is that the Parva naturalia do not study the attributes they study because these are common to the soul and the body (although they are), but because they are attributes of the soul.

One must go to the first paragraph of the De anima to see the significance of the remark, in the De sensu, about common attributes (402a7–10):

Our aim is to grasp and recognize its [sc. the soul’s] nature and essence, and after that all the attributes it has, some of which are considered to be affections peculiar to the soul and some, on the other hand, to belong also to the animals on account of the soul.

This syllabus in nuce mentions the subject matter both of the De anima—nature and essence of the soul—and the Parva naturalia—attributes of the soul.²² What comes next is the received opinion—the endoxon—about these attributes: some are peculiar to the soul, others belong to the animal as a whole. In the first chapter of the De sensu, following upon the study of the soul’s nature and essence in the De anima, Aristotle is in a position to correct this endoxon: it is now clear that the attributes of the soul are—at least so far as natural philosophy is concerned—common to the soul and the body. These attributes—the soul’s activities and affections—are the subject matter of the following inquiry, which will inevitably spend a great deal of time investigating the corporeal conditions for their occurrence (their material causes).

This being said, it must be conceded that Aristotle’s treatment of the attributes of the soul is not particularly systematic. This has probably contributed to the popularity of another view, namely, that the Parva naturalia consist of a series of appendices to the De anima.²³ Thus De sensu 2–5 has been thought to fill in the blanks of De anima 2.6–11 with discussions of the objects and organs of sight, taste and smell—although touch and hearing are virtually passed over in silence²⁴—whereas the De memoria and the treatises on sleep and dreams could be taken to supplement the accounts of the common sense and phantasia in De anima 3.2–3—although many aspects of these psychic faculties remain obscure (for an attempt at a systematic account of Aristotle’s theory of the common sense, see Giuseppe Feola’s contribution to this volume, Chap. 2). Again, if Aristotle’s focus in the Parva naturalia is on psychic activities and affections, this explains why he does not proceed faculty by faculty, as in the De anima, but it cannot, of course, excuse the omission of important psychic activities.

In sum, there is admittedly little to gain by reducing the De anima to a propaedeutics to the Parva naturalia and the treatises that we call “zoological.” Form, after all, has a much stronger claim, in Aristotle’s view, to be the primary substance than the compound of form and matter does. But there is certainly plenty to lose by embracing the opposite extreme and writing off the Parva naturalia as a mere appendix to the De anima.²⁵

The debate over the subject matter of the De anima, the Parva naturalia and Aristotle’s “zoological” works was simmering throughout Antiquity and the Middle Ages, occasionally reaching boiling point, most notably, perhaps, in the late thirteenth century (see de Boer 2013, 71–91). The view I have outlined above is not, I think, at fundamental variance with that in Alexander of Aphrodisias’ commentary on the De sensu et sensibilibus (early third cent.), even though Alexander tends to say that the Parva naturalia are concerned with the activities of ensouled creatures rather than with those of the soul (In De sensu 3.4–6; 4.8–14; 5.1–3).²⁶ At De sensu 1, 436a2–4, Aristotle says, in literal translation, that “the next thing is to investigate, concerning animals and all things that possess life, which of their actions are peculiar and which are common.”²⁷ In the light of what has been argued above the natural way of interpreting this would be that Aristotle announces a passage, within the framework of biology (and more generally of natural philosophy), from the study of the soul’s essence to the study of its attributes. Alexander, however, is eager to stress that the new inquiry launched by Aristotle is one about animals (as well as other ensouled creatures), apparently in response to some unnamed opponents who denied that Parva naturalia 1–5 belonged to the study of animals (In De sensu 5.1–19). To this end, he repeatedly paraphrases Aristotle—by separating the governing clause of the sentence in which Aristotle declares his intention from the indirect question it governs—as saying “the study that follows that of the soul is that of animals and all ensouled creatures as well as of their activities, both those that are common and those that are peculiar to each species of them” (In De sensu 2.7–10; cf. 3.3–6; 3.17–20; 4.8–9; 5.3–4).²⁸ This obviously indicates that Alexander thought there are close links between the Parva naturalia and the “zoological” works. But it does not mean that he takes the subject matter of the Parva naturalia to be something else than the activities of the soul. On the contrary: what Aristotle is doing, according to Alexander, when he says that the activities of animals and other ensouled creatures are practically all common to the soul and the body, is providing an explanation as to why it is reasonable for someone discussing the activities of the soul to discuss the activities of animals and other ensouled creatures (In De sensu 2.11–15). The implication seems to be that on Alexander’s view the Parva naturalia continue that part of the study of natural philosophy which deals with soul by turning from the essential properties of the souls of animals and plants, that is to say, their faculties, which have already been dealt with in the De anima, to their attributes, that is to say, their activities and affections.

3 Reception in Late Antiquity and Byzantium

For a general overview of the history of reception and influence of the Parva naturalia in antiquity, see Morel (2003).

Aristotelian philosophy in general, and natural philosophy in particular, suffered relative neglect in the Hellenistic era. Some minor works in the corpus aristotelicum that develop aspects of the study of the attributes of the soul (mainly physiological and physical ones) derive from the earlier part of this period, namely De spiritu, De coloribus, De audibilibus and some of the Problemata.²⁹ Traces of Aristotle’s theories of sleep and dreams in these and other Hellenistic works are uncovered in van der Eijk and Hulskamp (2010, 54–61). More remarkably, the Parva naturalia do not seem to have been on the syllabus of any philosophy schools in Late Antiquity either, this time in stark contrast to other Aristotelian works on natural philosophy.³⁰ Apart from Alexander of Aphrodisias’ extant commentary on the De sensu (see above), highlighted in Katerina Ierodiakonou’s and Pavel Gregoric’s contributions to this volume (chs 4 and 5), and Aspasius’ lost commentary on the same work (referred to by Alexander, In De sensu 10.1–2),³¹ there is no evidence that any ancient commentary was ever written on any of the treatises included in the collection.³² In fact, with one notable exception, of which I will soon say more, they are only very sporadically referenced in the rather substantial philosophical literature surviving from the period dominated by the Neoplatonic schools of Rome, Alexandria and Athens (ca 250–600).³³ The situation is similar with the “zoological” works.³⁴ The De anima, in contrast, was assiduously studied: witness the four commentaries that have been wholly or partly preserved from the period between the fourth and sixth centuries (Themistius, Philoponus, Ps.-Simplicius, Ps.-Philoponus).

A clue to the reason for this situation is offered by a comparison of the three ancient commentators on the Meteorology whose works have survived: Alexander of Aphrodisias (early third cent.), John Philoponus (commentary on book 1 only, dated c. 530–35) and Olympiodorus (commentary dated a few years after 565). In the first chapter of the Meteorology, Aristotle suggests that his whole course of natural philosophy will be “practically” brought to completion once the Physics, the De caelo, the De generatione et corruptione and the study in hand have been followed by accounts, “in accordance with the method that guides us, of animals and plants, in general and separately” (1.1, 339a6–8). Alexander (In Meteor. 3.32–4.11) understands this as a reference to the whole series of works including the De anima, the Parva naturalia and the “zoological” treatises: some of these are “general” in the sense of dealing with all kinds of animals and some treat specifically with one kind of animal, namely human beings.³⁵ Philoponus (In Meteor. 9.12–18) follows Alexander in all this,³⁶ except that he mentions the “zoological” treatises before the De anima rather than after the Parva naturalia (and furthermore disagrees with Alexander’s interpretation of the phrase “the method that guides us,” τὸν ὑφηγημένον τρόπον).³⁷ However, the fact that Alexander mentions the “zoological” treatises last is hardly of any significance, since he ends the commentary by proposing that the next work in order is the De partibus animalium (In Meteor. 227.18–22).³⁸

Olympiodorus (In Meteor. 3.34–4.15; cf. 14.8–20) takes a different approach. He distinguishes between, on the one hand, works on the souls of plants and (non-human) animals and, on the other, the De anima. The former include (at least some of) the “zoological” works and the Parva naturalia; these are what remains, after the Meteorology, of Aristotle’s course of natural philosophy. The De anima, on the other hand, is not primarily a work on natural philosophy but on “theology.” The classification of the De anima within the framework of Aristotle’s division of scientific knowledge was a problem that exercised the Neoplatonists (see Blumenthal 1996, 73–89), if not, perhaps, to the extent that it was later to exercise the medieval and Renaissance schoolmen. In De partibus animalium 1.1 (641a32–b10), Aristotle had explained that it cannot fall within the purview of natural philosophy to study all soul, lest it fall within its purview to study everything, since on the one hand sense perception and perceptible objects and on the other hand intellect and intelligible objects are correlatives, and the study of correlatives belongs to one and the same science (and everything is either perceptible or intelligible).³⁹ Ps.-Simplicius (In De an. 2.2–4.11) quotes this passage in full and infers from the fact that intellect is discussed in the De anima that the latter study, in conformity with its subject matter, straddles the divide between natural philosophy and theology. In the same spirit, Olympiodorus compares the De anima to an amphibious animal (In Meteor. 4.5–6). But whereas Ps.-Simplicius thinks it is mainly to do with natural philosophy, Olympiodorus, as noted, ascribes to it a predominantly theological purpose. This purpose, however, he says (In Meteor. 3.34–4.15), does not preclude Aristotle from also discussing natural philosophy in it (any more than he was precluded from discussing theology in the eighth book of the Physics),⁴⁰ which is why Aristotle says that the course of natural philosophy will be only “practically” finished after the accounts of animals and plants.⁴¹ So, too, Philoponus, in his De anima commentary, construes Aristotle’s express statement that “it is the natural philosopher’s task to study the soul, either all soul or the above described” (403a27–28) to mean that it is the natural philosopher’s task to discuss the kind of soul that is “not without matter,” but the first philosopher’s to discuss “immaterial and intellectual souls”: the words “all soul” have been added since “the consummate natural philosopher elevates himself also to the transcendent causes of natural things” (In De an. 55.8–20). Accordingly, when Aristotle says, in the first lines of the De anima, that “knowledge (ἡ γνῶσις) of the soul is held to contribute to all truth but especially to nature” (402a4–6), Philoponus explains that this is because the soul is already an object of theology and ethics and its study therefore cannot properly be said to contribute (συμβάλλεσθαι) to these sciences as it does to natural philosophy (In De an. 24.33–25.30).

For the Neoplatonists, then, the De anima is a transitional work. It represents the beginning of the ascent from the study of the natural world to that of the divine realm. To say that it would have been awkward for them to continue their natural philosophy courses by expatiating on the attributes of animals and plants rather than proceed to mathematics and metaphysics is probably an understatement. In so far as they wished to lecture on zoology and botany they would have had to do so before the De anima. But the Parva naturalia, as we have seen, presuppose the De anima. Easier, then, perhaps, to dispense with them altogether.⁴²

I mentioned that there is a notable exception to the general lack of attention paid to the Parva naturalia in this period. This is provided by Priscian of Lydia’s Solutiones ad Chosroem, a series of replies to questions on natural philosophy supposedly asked by the Sassanian Emperor (who would have had the opportunity during the Athenian Neoplatonists’ sojourn at Ctesiphon in 531–532).⁴³ For his discussion of the nature of sleep and dreams in chapters 2–3 of this work, Priscian makes liberal use of Parva naturalia 3–5 (and probably also draws on a lost work on sleep by Theophrastus). The Solutiones ad Chosroem survive only in a Latin translation, done, according to some, in the sixth or seventh century, but according to others, and I think more plausibly, in the milieu around John Scotus Eriugena (c. 800–c. 877).⁴⁴ Their influence on early medieval philosophy seems negligible, but a number of excerpts, including some from chapters 2–3, are found in the Speculum maius, a widely used encyclopedia compiled by Vincent of Beauvais (final version c. 1258).⁴⁵

The first proper commentaries on most of the Parva naturalia and the “zoological” treatises were written only in the early twelfth century, when—apparently at the behest of the princess and historian Anna Komnene—various gaps in the Greek secondary literature on Aristotle were filled, in this case as in several others by Michael of Ephesus. The only work in the collection not to be attended to by Michael was the De sensu, obviously because Alexander’s commentary was still available. Michele Trizio’s contribution to the present volume (ch. 9) examines the sources quarried by Michael and other Middle Byzantine authors in the absence of ancient precedents, while Péter Lautner takes a closer look at Michael’s understanding of the common sense (ch. 3).

Michael’s commentaries may not have left a very significant mark on the Arabic and Latin philosophical traditions within the chronological scope of this volume: they were not translated into Latin until the mid-sixteenth century,⁴⁶ although Anthony Preus has argued (1981, 14–21), on the basis of interpretative similarities, that material from Michael’s commentaries may have reached Albert the Great and others by way of William of Moerbeke’s translations of the Parva naturalia (see below, Sec. 5). What is clear is, as Preus also pointed out (1981, 22), that Niccolò Leonico Tomeo (1456–1531), despite professing to rely more on his own ingenuity than on previous commentators, drew heavily on Michael for his influential commentaries on the whole Parva naturalia (first printed in Venice 1523) as well as the De motu animalium and De incessu animalium, even before the Latin translations appeared.⁴⁷ Tomeo’s commentary on the De memoria is briefly discussed by Roberto Lo Presti in the concluding chapter of this volume. Moreover, the influence of Michael’s commentaries on the later Byzantine tradition is pervasive. The four Greek paraphrases of the Parva naturalia that saw the light of day in the period from the late thirteenth to the mid-fifteenth century are all highly derivative, directly or indirectly, of Alexander’s and Michael’s works. These are by Sophonias (fl. c. 1296);⁴⁸ George Pachymeres (1242–c. 1310);⁴⁹ Theodore Metochites (1270–1332);⁵⁰ and George Scholarios (1400–c. 1473).⁵¹

As is shown by John Demetracopoulos in his contribution to the present volume (ch. 12), one issue concerning which neither Pachymeres nor Scholarios were satisfied with either Aristotle’s discussion or Michael’s comments was that of divination by means of divine inspiration. They both saw fit to correct Aristotle in a supplementary note to their respective paraphrases: it is noteworthy that neither tried to father his own view on the Philosopher (Scholarios being, however, prepared to excuse Aristotle’s mistakes, seeing that the truth had not yet been fully revealed in his times). Scholarios was aided in his mission to set things right by his knowledge of Thomas Aquinas and also, Demetracopoulos argues, of Albert the Great.

4 Arabic and Hebrew Reception

For an overview of the Arabic reception of the Parva nat., see Di Martino (2003).

As amply demonstrated by Rotraud Hansberger’s, Olga Lizzini’s and Emma Gannagé’s contributions to the present volume (chs 6–8), the late Byzantine interest in divination was shared with the Arabic reception of the Parva naturalia from its very earliest stages onwards. Aristotle’s argument against the possibility of God-sent dreams lacks traction in both the Byzantine and the Islamic worlds for the very same reason: far from considering it an absurdity that God should send veridical dreams to anybody but the wisest, Christians and Muslims alike were prone to agree with George Pachymeres that “it is no wonder if [the dreamers] are ordinary people, for the less they participate in human wisdom, the more they are shaped by the divine” (quoted from Demetracopoulos, ch. 12, 305). Conversely, as Lizzini writes (ch. 8, 150): “the reason why revelation and veridical dreams can come to ordinary people is, in the Arabic-Islamic tradition to which Avicenna belongs, precisely that they are sent by God.”

This interest looms especially large in the Kitāb al-Ḥiss wa-l-maḥsūs (“Book on sense perception and the perceived”), an early-to-mid-ninth-century adaptation of Parva naturalia 1–6, which purports to be a translation of Aristotle’s works, but “is, in fact, characterised far more by Neoplatonic and Galenic than by Aristotelian ideas” (Hansberger 2010, 143). Various features (inter alia, excerpts from the Arabic translation of Plotinus, Enn. 4.6) point to a provenance in the circle of scholars around Al-Kindī (800–870) (Hansberger 2010, 150). Before the discovery, in 1985, of a seventeenth-century witness to most of the original text in the Rampur Raza Library, the work was exclusively known through Averroes’ epitome (see below) and a few extracts in other authors.⁵² Despite its many obscurities, it does seem to tend strongly towards a separation of memory from sense perception à la Plotinus, and in its encephalocentrism as well as in many of the details concerning the location of soul faculties in the brain it is clearly indebted to Greek medical literature. But it also introduces concepts and ideas with no equivalents in the Greek tradition, such as the protean maʿnā—glossed by Hansberger in the present context as “cognitive content”—later to be redeveloped by Avicenna and translated in the Latin Middle Ages as intentio.

In the years after the discovery of the Rampur codex, it has become increasingly clear how significant the later influence of the Kitāb al-Ḥiss wa-l-maḥsūs was, especially on theories of dreaming and prophecy. Much work remains to be done, but reflections of its ideas have been detected in the works of Al-Fārābi (c. 878–c. 950), Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā, c. 980–1037) and Avempace (Ibn Bājja, c. 1095–1138), to name but a few especially illustrious users (Hansberger 2010, 158–160). For some brief notes on its fortuna in Jewish thinkers from Isaac Israeli (c. 855–955) to Moses ibn Ezra (c. 1060–c. 1139) and beyond, see Kahana-Smilansky (2012).

Apparently for lack of an accurate translation of Aristotle’s genuine treatises, the Kitāb al-Ḥiss wa-l-maḥsūs was in its turn epitomized by Averroes (Ibn Rushd, 1126–1198; epitome completed January 1170; ed. Blumberg 1972). In 1254, Averroes’ epitome was translated into Hebrew by Moses ibn Tibbon, and this translation was in time (1324) supplied with a commentary by the prodigious Jewish polymath Levi ben Gershom (Gersonides, 1288–1344). For the reception of Averroes’ epitome in a couple of Renaissance authors (Julius Caesar Scaliger and Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola), see Gignoni (2013, 180–186).

5 Latin Medieval Reception

For a general overwiew of the history of reception and influence of the Parva nat. in the Latin Middle Ages, see De Leemans (2011) and, specifically for the De memoria, Bloch (2007, 137–228).

Through Michael Scot’s translation (c. 1230) of Averroes’ epitome (ed. Shields 1949), the contents of the Kitāb al-Ḥiss wa-l-maḥsūs were also introduced into the Latin-speaking world.⁵³ Most of those concepts and ideas that had been added to Aristotle’s account, notably those of intentiones and the complex of internal senses, were already familiar in Western Europe through the writings of Avicenna, whose authority on matters of the soul rivalled that of Aristotle’s in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.

All the same, the discrepancies between the Parva naturalia and Averroes’ epitome were bound to cause discomfiture to those who undertook to teach and comment on the former, as Aristotle’s works on natural philosophy rose to ascendancy in the course of the thirteenth century. The so-called “old translation” (translatio vetus) of Parva naturalia 2–8 was executed in the second to third quarters of the twelfth century by James of Venice (2, 6–8) and another, unknown, translator (3–5). That of the De sensu is later, perhaps the work of Nicolaus Graecus, an assistant to Robert Grosseteste (c. 1175–1253) (thus Bloch 2008a). In the third quarter of the thirteenth century, William of Moerbeke made a “new translation” (translatio nova), which, at least in part, seems really to consist in a revision of the vetus. William also translated Alexander of Aphrodisias’ commentary on the De sensu (ed. Thurot 1875).

References and quotations in authors such as Alfred of Sareshel (died after 1220) testify to the spread and use of the translatio vetus around the turn of the twelfth century (see Ricklin 1998, 365–378). On the other hand, it has been shown by Gudrun Vuillemin-Diem (2003, 35–66) that the excerpts and paraphrases from Parva naturalia 3–5 in the preserved fragments of David of Dinant’s Quaternuli (consigned to the flames in 1210) must be the author’s own translations made directly from the Greek. In fact, besides Aristotle’s well-known advocacy of the pernicious doctrine of the eternity of the world, what so outraged the authorities in Paris that they banned the teaching of Aristotelian natural philosophy and metaphysics in 1210 and again in 1215 may have been precisely the fact that Aristotle took such a dim view of the possibility of God-sent dreams: at least that is what we are led to believe by a notice written by Roger Bacon in his old age.⁵⁴

Alfred of Sareshel may even have written commentaries on Parva naturalia 3–6 (see Burnett 1996, 32; Ricklin 1998, 362–366; 378). But the earliest extant Latin commentaries are either those by Adam of Buckfield, master of arts at Oxford (dated before c. 1244, according to Brumberg-Chaumont 2010, 122), or those preserved anonymously in the Erfurt codex Ampl. 4° 312 (copied in Oxford c. 1240, according to Wood 2003, 29–41), both of which cover treatises 1–6.⁵⁵ The influence of Buckfield’s commentaries was enduring enough to be still felt in Thomas Aquinas’s commentaries on the De sensu and the De memoria. Buckfield is otherwise known to have been highly reliant on Averroes as a commentator, but his commentaries on the Parva naturalia seem to constitute an exception: the one on the De sensu relegates all references to Averroes to excursuses, while the one on the De memoria mentions the Andalusian commentator but once, and then only to misrepresent his words (Brumberg-Chaumont 2010, 133–136). It is a natural suspicion that this unexpected lack of consideration for Averroes’ epitome is due to difficulties encountered in trying to harmonize its contents with those of Aristotle’s treatises. The commentary on the De sensu by Buckfield’s fellow Oxonian Roger Bacon may date from the latter’s stint at Paris in the 1240s. In that case, it is a rare testimony to the continued teaching of Aristotelian natural philosophy in the French capital during the first four decades after the proscriptions (and to the benefits of the free movement of academics in Europe—including Britain).⁵⁶

The leading role of English masters in the development of natural philosophy in the first half of the thirteenth century is underscored by the presence of the so-called Oxford gloss in a number of manuscript witnesses to the “corpus vetustius.” This is a collection of marginal and interlinear scholia drawing from various sources, but primarily from Buckfield’s commentaries, and first assembled, in all likelihood, in the schools of Oxford in the mid-thirteenth century.⁵⁷ The “corpus vetustius” was the main vehicle of dissemination of the translatio vetus: as we have seen (Sect. 2), it only included Parva naturalia 1–6.

Perhaps the most ambitious commentaries on the translatio vetus were those by Albert the Great (1254–1257), enhanced by first-order treatises from Albert’s own pen on the topics covered in the remaining Parva naturalia (including the movement of animals).⁵⁸ In this volume, Albert’s commentary on the De somno et vigilia (i.e. Parva nat. 3–5) is subject to examination by Silvia Donati (ch. 10), who also compares it with Buckfield’s on the same works. Albert, too, discusses Averroes and other Arabic philosophers in excursuses. But, as Donati shows, he “also derives the conceptual framework within which he develops his exposition of the text from the Arabic philosophers” (ch. 10, 173). And he had already drawn extensively on both the translatio vetus and Averroes’ epitome for his De homine (early 1240s: on this work, see Hasse 2008).

The translatio nova—and no doubt the requirement to study all of Aristotle’s natural philosophy, introduced at the Arts Faculty of Paris in 1255—ushered in a period of intensified interest in the Parva naturalia, which were now generally treated as a connected series including treatises 7–8 as well as the De motu animalium and the De incessu animalium. René Antoine Gauthier suggested (1985, p. 4 ad Prohemium ll. 38–54) that the switch, advocated by Robert Kilwardby, Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, from an arrangement in which all the “zoological” works precede to one in which they follow the De anima and the Parva naturalia was encouraged by Alexander of Aphrodisias’ adherence to the latter arrangement in his recently translated De sensu commentary.

But apart from the fact that Alexander does not really seem to think that all the “zoological” works are posterior to the Parva naturalia in the order of study,⁵⁹ there were clearly more systematic considerations in favour of such a rearrangement. Thirteenth- and fourteenth-century commentators on the De anima were routinely faced with the challenge of determining whether the subject matter of the work under discussion was the soul—as might be expected from its title—or the ensouled body—as might seem to follow from its classification as a work on natural philosophy (see Köhler 2000, 352–368). At the same time, the specific inquiries pursued in the Parva naturalia were generally considered to be “subalternate” to the science embodied in the De anima, that is, to be so related to it that its first principles could be carried over to them, because their subject matter was, although distinct, “in some [relevant] respect the same,” as Aristotle had said (An. post. 1.7, 75b8–9). Consequently, depending on how the subject matter of the De anima was understood, the Parva naturalia would be conceived of as dealing either with the activities and affections of the soul or with the activities and affections of the ensouled body. The majority view was that they deal with the activities and affections of the soul. But since the soul has three main faculties, the different treatises included in the Parva naturalia could be further divided according as they dealt with the activities and affections of the sensitive soul (usually 1–5, De motu an. and De inc. an.) or those of the vegetative soul (usually 6–8: for details, see Köhler 2000, 368–383). A variant is Thomas Aquinas’ division into treatises relating to the vital (6–8), motive (De motu an. and De inc. an.) and sensitive (1–5) functions of the soul (Sentencia libri De sensu et sensato, Prohemium 83–113). Given that the activities and affections of the soul are common to the soul and the body, it would seem only natural, then, to postpone the investigation of those bodies that are distinguished by being informed, respectively, by both a sensitive and a vegetative soul and by a vegetative soul only, until after these souls have been thoroughly understood.⁶⁰

During this period commentaries proliferated, both exhaustive “literal” ones and more selective question commentaries. The vast majority of these remain unedited, but one of the goals of Representation and Reality (see above, Sect. 1) is to mitigate this situation: thus the commentaries on the De somno et vigilia (including the De insomniis and the De divinatione) by Geoffrey of Aspall (question commentary dated 1260–65), James of Douai (combined literal and question commentary dated c. 1270), Simon of Faversham (question commentary dated c. 1280) and Walter Burley (literal commentary dated 1300–1306) have appeared in critical editions by Sten Ebbesen (2013, 2014, 2015) and Christina Thomsen Thörnqvist (2014) over the last few years. With the possible exception of Aspall, these are all based on the translatio nova: it is notable that Douai also quotes from Alexander of Aphrodisias’ In De sensu. Averroes’ epitome is still authoritative for all these commentators; so is Albert the Great’s commentary, for all except Aspall again. Faversham’s and Burley’s commentaries are closely related: since the latter work was composed when both men were resident in Oxford it is a natural enough suspicion that it is dependent on the former, but this remains to be ascertained.

By far the most well-known commentaries based on the translatio nova are those of Thomas Aquinas on Parva naturalia 1–2 (ed. Gauthier 1985). Peter of Auvergne’s literal commentaries on Parva naturalia 3–8 and the De motu animalium were apparently intended to supplement these (De Leemans 2000, 283; 298–299). While Peter seems to have relied on both the old and the new translations for his literal commentaries (see Dunne 2002, secs 16–32), his question commentaries on Parva naturalia 1–6 may be based solely on the old translation (thus Bloch 2007, 207–211, concerning the Quaestiones in De memoria).

Two other commentators from this fertile period deserve to be singled out for special mention. The first is John of Jandun (c. 1285–1328), “prince of the Averroists,” whose question commentaries on Parva naturalia 1–8 plus the De motu animalium (composed in 1309) maintained their popularity throughout the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, especially at the universities of northern Italy. Far from regurgitating bits and pieces of Averroes’ compendium of the Kitāb al-Ḥiss wa-l-maḥsūs, Jandun drew on his vast knowledge of both Aristotle’s and the Andalusian commentator’s works and in addition made intelligent use of Alexander of Aphrodisias’ In De sensu, for example in his solutions to the puzzles about the capacity of primary bodies to act and be acted upon (see Brenet 2010) and the nature of potential sensibles (see Robert 2014), raised by Aristotle’s remarks at Sens. 4, 441b7–15, and Sens. 6, 445b20–446a20, respectively. For the transmission of Jandun’s commentaries, see De Leemans (2000, 316–322).

The second fourteenth-century commentator I would like to mention is John Buridan (1295/1300–1358/1361), “the most influential philosopher of the later fourteenth century,” according to The Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy (Pasnau 2010, 2: 902), who wrote both literal and question commentaries on the whole Parva naturalia (see Michael 1985, 736–780). A legendary figure since his own lifetime, Buridan has attracted much serious attention from historians of philosophy and science over the last hundred years, first for his physics (impetus theory), later for his logic and in more recent times also for his natural and moral psychology, especially his theory of free will. It might seem astonishing in view of this that there are virtually no scholarly discussions of his Parva naturalia commentaries (for a couple of exceptions, see Sobol 2001 and Grellard 2010), until it is realized that the question commentaries are only available in a Renaissance edition (by George Lokert, Paris 1516) and the literal ones have never been committed to the press. — More medieval commentaries are discussed in De Leemans (2011). See also the list in De Raedemaeker (1965). A comprehensive catalogue of Latin medieval question commentaries on Parva naturalia 1–5 has recently been published by Sten Ebbesen, Christina Thomsen Thörnqvist and Véronique Decaix (2016) on behalf of Representation and Reality.

One can try to measure the impact of a philosophical work in a given period by counting manuscripts or printed editions, commentaries, and manuscripts or printed editions of commentaries. We are all familiar with the pitfalls of bibliometrics. A more laborious but ultimately perhaps more accurate method is to assess the degree to which the content of the philosophical work permeates discussions relating to its subject matter in works which are not commentaries on it. In chapter 11 of the present volume, Martin Pickavé examines some such discussions of the nature of sleep in authors of the late thirteenth century (Henry of Ghent, Richard of Middleton, Thomas Aquinas, Peter of Tarentaise and Peter John Olivi), with special reference to the question of whether sleep is, as Aristotle seems to have held (Insomn. 1, 458b15–25; 3, 461b30–462a8; 462a27–31), compatible with intellectual (although not with perceptual) activity.

6 Renaissance Reception

After a new curriculum was introduced at Paris in 1366, Parva naturalia 7–8 were again displaced from the focus of attention. According to De Leemans (2011), late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century commentaries on the Parva naturalia largely divide into two groups. Those in the first group deal only with treatises 1–6: many of these seem to be connected to the teaching activities at Paris. Those in the second group are characterized, on the one hand, by similarities with respect to content and, on the other, by the fact that they are all based neither on the translatio vetus nor on the nova but on a compendium of Aristotle’s natural philosophy by the otherwise unknown late fourteenth- or early fifteenth-century German Dominican Johannes Kro(n)sbein (see De Leemans 2000, 341–360). The commentaries in the second group are for the most part anonymous, except one, which is attributed on the flyleaf of the only manuscript (Erfurt, Ampl. 2° 334) to Marsilius of Inghen (c. 1340–1396). While this attribution is dubious, Marsilius is acknowledged as the author of another series of (question) commentaries on the whole Parva naturalia.

Aristotle had said in the first chapter of the De sensu that “the majority of natural philosophers end up in the study of medicine, whereas those among the physicians who pursue their art in a more philosophical way take the study of nature as their starting-point” (436a19–b1). In the Renaissance universities of northern Italy, this observation, often invoked in support of the subalternation of medicine to natural philosophy, crystallized into a motto: “ubi desinit physicus, ibi medicus incipit.”⁶¹ The unusually close ties that were forged between natural philosophy and medicine in this educational setting, where theology was of minor importance, tended to further the study of psychology in general and psycho-physiology in particular.⁶²

As Padua became, in the late fifteenth century, a leading centre of Aristotelian studies with a heavy emphasis on natural philosophy, Averroes retained—and even reinforced—his position as the foremost commentator on Aristotle, in spite of all the clamour caused by his notorious view that the intellective soul is one and the same in all human beings (see Hasse 2007, 115–121). His position was perhaps bolstered by the enduring popularity, mentioned above, of the commentaries of John of Jandun. One may also note (as pointed out by Hasse 2007, 121–125) that Avicenna’s theory of prophecy enjoyed a relatively favourable reception at the hands of some north Italian philosophers in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, including the most celebrated and controversial of them all, Pietro Pomponazzi (1462–1525). At the same time, new impulses came from the rediscovery of hitherto unknown Greek commentaries. It was in this period that Philoponus’ and Ps.-Simplicius’ commentaries on the De anima—as well as Alexander of Aphrodisias’ work by the same name—were first disseminated in the West, in printed editions both of the Greek originals and of Latin translations.⁶³ Especially Ps.-Simplicius left a definitive mark, not least on Marcantonio Genua, first ordinary professor of natural philosophy at Padua from 1531 until his death in 1563, who became known as the leader of the “Simpliciani.”⁶⁴

As regards the Parva naturalia, I have already mentioned that Michael of Ephesus’ commentaries were translated in the mid-sixteenth century and partly integrated, even before that date, into the works of Niccolò Leonico Tomeo, who held the newly created position for teaching Aristotle’s natural philosophy from the Greek text in Padua between 1497 and 1509. Latin versions of George Pachymeres’ compendium of Aristotelian philosophy and Theodore Metochites’ paraphrases of Aristotle’s works on natural philosophy were also printed in the sixteenth century, but practically nothing is known about their reception.⁶⁵ The Renaissance fortuna of the Byzantine literature is touched upon in John Monfasani’s contribution to this volume (ch. 13), where our attention is also drawn to the remarkable spurt of interest in translating the Parva naturalia into Latin in the years around 1520. Of the five known translations that saw the light in the Renaissance, four date from between 1518 and 1523, including one by Tomeo.

The new conditions under which Aristotelian scholarship was carried out in the sixteenth century—the widespread knowledge of Greek, the access to most of the earlier Aristotelian literature written in Greek, Arabic and Latin, as well as the orientation along the requirements of medicine rather than theology—have all helped shape the commentaries on the De memoria studied in Roberto Lo Presti’s contribution to this volume (ch. 14). Besides the one by Tomeo, these are a late work by Pomponazzi’s erstwhile rival and adversary at Padua, the renegade “Averroist” Agostino Nifo (first edition Venice 1523); an equally late work by Pomponazzi’s reluctant ally, the Dominican theologian Crisostomo Javelli (first edition Venice 1531); a commentary by the somewhat obscure Bolognese professor Bernardino Crippa (first edition Bologna 1567); an early work by the then professor of philosophy and medicine at Geneva, Simone Simoni (first edition Geneva 1566); and an annotated paraphrase by Antonio Scaino (first edition Venice 1599), earlier in his career a clergyman at the court of Alfonso II d’Este in Ferrara and perhaps best known in our time for having authored the first book on tennis.

Katharine Park has argued that sixteenth-century psychology, as practised by natural philosophers, is characterized by “an impulse to favour simpler and more physiological explanations,” which propelled “Renaissance thinkers further and further from the psychological thought of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and moved them in the direction of seventeenth-century writers such as Descartes and Hobbes” (1988, 477).⁶⁶ She ascribes this impulse partly to a humanist concern to purify Aristotelian doctrine of the “accretions and interpolations introduced by medieval commentators” (1988, 479). Its effects, she suggests, are shown in the increasing tendency to adopt (invoking the methodology of Ockham or Buridan) the view that the differences between the various activities of the soul are due neither to real nor to formal distinctions within the soul but to observable differences in the anatomy of the bodily organs through which these activities are carried out. As a result, “it became commonplace for commentators on De anima and other writers in the Aristotelian tradition—even the most conservative—to introduce arguments based on anatomical information into treatments of the organic soul” (Park 1988, 482).

The so-called Cursus Conimbricensis, a five-volume set of Aristotelian textbooks (for the genre, see Schmitt 1988) first published by the Jesuit College of Arts at the University of Coimbra between 1592 and 1606 and subsequently in over a hundred editions world-wide,⁶⁷ would seem to be a case in point. Volume 2, part 2 contains commentaries on Parva naturalia 2–8, chiefly the work of Emmanuel de Goes (1592). The contents of the De sensu are covered in a supplement (Tractatio aliquot problematum ad quinque sensus spectantium, by Cosmas de Magalhães) to the commentary on the De anima (vol. 4, 1598).⁶⁸ In addition, however, the De anima commentary itself, also mainly by de Goes, includes discussions of the anatomy of the sense organs and other physiological details from Andreas Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica and a host of other sources, in apparent violation of a rule in the 1591 Jesuit college regulations that, during the course on the De anima,

in the second book, when the sense organs are discussed, the philosopher should not digress into anatomy and such topics, which belong to the domain of the physicians. Instead he should add, if he has the time, the Parva naturalia.⁶⁹

It is clear that the Conimbricenses shared their penchant for bringing physiology to bear on their discussions of the De anima with the authors of other textbooks of the era, such as the fellow Jesuit Girolamo Dandini’s De corpore animato (Paris 1610), the digressive nature of which has been admirably demonstrated by Michael Edwards (2008). The other side of the coin is that most sixteenth- and seventeenth-century textbooks, even the Carmelite Cursus Complutensis (five volumes, Alcalá, Madrid and Paris 1624–1640), seem to have dispensed with any specific sections devoted to the Parva naturalia. It is unclear to what extent the physiological tendency in these Catholic works responds to the precedent set by Protestant authors, notably Philipp Melanchthon, whose commentary on the De anima (1540) swerves so far in this direction that it should perhaps be classified as a work on anthropology rather than psychology. It was later revised to take into account Vesalius’ work (Liber de anima recognitus, 1552).⁷⁰

7 Post-Renaissance Reception

In the perspective of Cartesian mind-body dualism, the principles of Aristotelian psychology are bound to seem arbitrary, not to say bizarre.⁷¹ Gary Hatfield has described (1995) how “the science of the soul” in the eighteenth century ceded the stage to other types of “psychology,” Erfahrungsseelenlehre and Associationism, which focused on the empirical study of the contents of human consciousness and (in the case of Associationism) the formulation of laws that govern the relations between these contents.⁷² The term “psycho-physiology,” which belongs in this theoretical context, properly denotes the study of the means of interaction between body and mind. To be sure, Aristotle’s “zoological” writings continued to draw admiration from many systematic biologists from Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon to Georges Cuvier and Richard Owen, until the theory of evolution irrevocably shifted the perspective.⁷³ But the study of the De anima and the Parva naturalia had fallen into virtual desuetude as early as the latter half of the seventeenth century. How limited the understanding of these texts was in the eighteenth century can be gauged from the treatment they received at the hands of the early historians of philosophy, all of whom shared a marked tendency to read Aristotle in the light of contemporary philosophical concerns. Not unexpectedly, the treatment in Jakob Brucker’s pioneering Historia critica philosophiae (first edition in 1742–1744) leaves the most to be desired, whereas the situation is somewhat ameliorated in the later works of Dietrich Tiedemann, Johann Gottlieb Buhle and Wilhelm Gottlieb Tennemann.⁷⁴ By the 1830s, however, Aristotelian psychology would return with a vengeance.⁷⁵ The impetus came from three different sources.

First, from the lecterns of academic philosophy. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel famously stated, in his Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie (1805–1830), that “in recent times no other philosophy has been so much offended against as this [sc. the Aristotelian], and to no other ancient philosopher so many apologies are owed as to Aristotle.”⁷⁶ This was his excuse for dwelling on Aristotle, “among the men of old, the one that most deserves to be studied,” for well over a hundred pages (or more than five hours at normal reading speed), including twenty pages on Aristotle’s psychology (De anima)—in spite of the time constraints.⁷⁷ In the introduction to the third part of the Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften (3rd ed. 1830), the Philosophy of Spirit, Hegel declares that

Aristotle’s books on the soul as well as his treatises on its specific aspects and conditions are for this reason still the most outstanding work—or the only one of speculative interest—on this subject matter. The essential purpose of a philosophy of the spirit can only be to reintroduce the concept into the cognition of the spirit and thereby also to reopen the meaning of these Aristotelian books.⁷⁸

The extent to which Hegel’s anthropology and psychology in the Encyclopedia are in fact inspired not only by the De anima but also by Parva naturalia 3–4 (which the Berlin professor understood as partly empirical, partly speculative, “physiology”: Werke 19: 169), has been shown by Alfredo Ferrarin (2001, 262–283).⁷⁹

Second, there seems to have been a wary admiration for Aristotelian physiology on the part of some of the practitioners of the nascent modern discipline. For instance, Johannes Müller, who refers sporadically to Aristotle in his groundbreaking Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschen (1833–1840)—he quotes, for instance, De anima 2.2, 413b22–24, in support of his view that the soul, albeit present throughout the living body, is not itself a compound (1840, 506)—also contributed to the historiography of the field by appending a German version of the De insomniis, a work he declared to be “in the true sense physiological” and to “contain essentially the correct explanation” of dreaming, to his early study of visual imagination (1826, 107–117).⁸⁰ Another important work on Aristotelian physiology—including the physiology of sense perception—from the period is the much-cited Ὕλη ἀνθρωπίνη by a precociously young Ludwig Philippson (1831).⁸¹ I cannot linger over the Aristotelian affinities of nineteenth-century physiologists here: let me simply note that the existence in 1837 of at least one author on psychology (Karl Alexander von Reichlin-Meldegg) who, without being either a Hegelian or a classical scholar and without so much as referring to Aristotle in the relevant context, “will,” in Max Dessoir’s words (1912, 208), “tolerate no opposition between the soul and the forces of animal life, but sees in the soul ‘the ground of life in a definite human individuality, [of a life] which bears the two-fold, interpenetrating character of animality and rationality’,” and whose “psychology aims therefore, like that of the Greeks, to trace the bodily and mental development of man,”⁸² suggests that there were more complex factors at work behind the return of Aristotelian psychology than the combination of Hegel’s influence and the prevalence of “historicism.”⁸³

This is not to deny that—third, but not least—the breakthrough of a stringent methodology for the study of history, and especially the advances made in classical philology, was a factor of crucial importance.⁸⁴ In 1817, acting on a proposal by Friedrich Schleiermacher, the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences resolved to commission a state-of-the-art critical edition of Aristotle’s collected works.⁸⁵ The result, produced by Immanuel Bekker with the assistance of Christian August Brandis (who was personally responsible for the supplement volume containing excerpts from the ancient commentaries), was a milestone in Aristotelian scholarship, which, even if most of the editions of individual works have long been superseded, still provides a frame of reference for citations of the corpus aristotelicum. It was completed, so far as the Aristotelian texts are concerned, in 1831: Brandis’ supplement appeared in 1836.⁸⁶

Empowered by the new methodology, the history of philosophy came to occupy an increasingly central position in the philosophy curriculum, especially at German universities (see Schneider 1999, 91–119). The output of printed works is staggering: one survey lists more than three hundred diachronic accounts published in German, French and English from 1810 to 1900, several of them in multivolume sets and some in multiple revised editions (Schneider 1999, 317–355). The first of these to offer a detailed and reliable account of Aristotle’s psychology, based on close readings both of the De anima and the Parva naturalia, is Brandis’ Handbuch der Geschichte der griechisch-römischen Philosophie (1835–1866).⁸⁷ Brandis could benefit not only from Bekker’s edition and his own extensive studies of the Greek commentary tradition but also from the recent edition-cum-commentary of the De anima by his younger friend and colleague Adolf Trendelenburg (Jena, 1833).⁸⁸

Trendelenburg’s is indeed the name most closely associated with the mid-nineteenth-century “Aristotelian revival.”⁸⁹ Much of the motivation for this revival stemmed from the perception of a failure on the part of academic speculative philosophy, especially as embodied by Hegelian dialectic, to provide a unitary theoretical framework for both the exact and the empirical sciences. Trendelenburg, widely influential as a teacher and administrator at the Berlin university, sought to rectify the situation, in his Logische Untersuchungen (1840), by elaborating a “theory of science” which would steer clear of the Scylla of materialism as well as the Charybdis of subjectivism.⁹⁰ It would follow the

organic worldview, which was founded in [the works of] Plato and Aristotle … and which must develop and gradually perfect itself through increasingly deeper investigation both of its fundamental concepts and its particular aspects—and in interaction with the objective sciences.⁹¹

Trendelenburg’s theory of science attempts to solve the problem of the possibility of knowledge by recourse to a metaphysics of movement, where movement is the first principle of both the external world of being and the internal world of cognition, which is forced into development by the presence, in both worlds, of purpose. The soul is defined, with explicit reference to Aristotle, as “an idea of purpose actualizing itself.”⁹² It is the end product of nature and the starting point of the life of moral action.⁹³ Trendelenburg’s inquiries into the soul, “not … as an isolated object but … in its organic context,” in his unpublished lectures on psychology (1840–1870), are briefly discussed in Fugali (2009, 181–190). That he took an interest in the physiology of sense perception is shown in an additional chapter to the second edition of Logische Untersuchungen (1862, 2: 478–485), where he concedes that recent experimental work in the field (he cites titles by Charles Bell, Johannes Müller and Hermann von Helmholtz) may appear to lend support to subjectivism, but insists that the construction of external objects—which are accessible to science—is only forced by natural sensory stimulation.⁹⁴ In the third edition he even responded to the challenge of Darwinism (1870, 2: 79–93n). But he never dealt specifically with the Parva naturalia.

Trendelenburg’s most famous student, Franz Brentano, never dealt specifically with the Parva naturalia either, although it should be noted that the account of Aristotelian psychology in his second Habilitationsschrift (1867) draws as freely on them as on the De anima. As is well known, Brentano later claimed Aristotelian heritage for his conception of the “intentional inexistence” of mental objects (1874, 1: 115–116 with n3), which admittedly comes across today as being perhaps more inspired by medieval Aristotelianism than by Aristotle’s own doctrines.⁹⁵ His enthusiasm for the medieval schoolmen had been stoked by his studies with Franz Jakob Clemens in Münster (“the first German philosopher to take up again the strands of medieval philosophy,” according to Brentano’s friend Georg von Hertling, quoted in Albertazzi 2006, 12). The Catholic Church was an important patron of Aristotelian and scholastic studies in the period, especially after Thomism was proclaimed, in the encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879), to be the philosophy most conformable to its teachings. Many of those who wrote on Aristotle’s psychology in the latter half of the nineteenth century did so from a Thomist perspective, like Vincenz Knauer, Aloïs van Weddingen, Herman Schell, Eugen Rolfes, Clemens Baeumker and Armand Thiéry. Clemens Baeumker in particular went on to play a seminal role in opening the field of medieval philosophy to historical research, at a time when Protestant philosophers still often viewed the subject matter with suspicion.⁹⁶ — A first survey of the material related to the Arabic and Hebrew reception of the Parva naturalia was carried out by Moritz Steinschneider in 1883.

Brentano’s frequent consultation of the Parva naturalia illustrates a general phenomenon. Studies of Aristotle’s psychology in this period had a systematic—rather than a developmental—approach and tended, as a matter of course, to use the Parva naturalia (at least treatises 1–4) as a supplement to the De anima, especially in their discussions of sense perception, the common sense and phantasia. This is true of such disparate works as Waddington-Kastus (1848), Beck (1860), Kampe (1870), Schell (1873), Baeumker (1877), Neuhaeuser (1878), Barco (1881), Schieboldt (1882), Chaignet (1883), Siebeck (1884), Knauer (1885) and Poppelreuter (1892), as well as of the treatments in various histories of philosophy, of which Eduard Zeller’s (1846: 473–503, 1862: 370–468, 1879: 479–607) deserves to be singled out (besides Brandis) as particularly important.⁹⁷ There was no shortage of such studies, all aspiring to a better historical understanding of its subject; as a creative force in the development of modern theories, however, Aristotelian psychology was probably exhausted after Trendelenburg, Brentano and Neoscholasticism—or so one might have thought before the controversy over whether or not “an Aristotelian philosophy of mind is still credible” erupted in the 1980s (see below).⁹⁸

Works that concentrate specifically on the contents of the Parva naturalia are fewer and further between. The only three separate publications from the latter half of the nineteenth century with such an exclusive focus that I am aware of are a brief study from 1879 of Aristotle’s theory of memory and the association of ideas by Julius Ziaja (who also published, in 1887, an annotated translation of De sensu 1–3, 439b18 and, in 1896, an equally brief study of Aristotle’s theory of light);⁹⁹ a forty-page précis of the whole collection in the Programm des königlich-kaiserlichen Obergymnasiums in Prague for 1881 by an otherwise unknown Johann Schmidt; and a brief and breezy essay on the psycho-physiology of dreams by the Belgian priest and experimental psychologist Armand Thiéry (1896). Jakob Freudenthal’s important 1869 paper, to which I have already referred, is more philologically than philosophically orientated. The same is true of his 1889 paper, which proposes an emendation of De memoria 2, 452a19–24. His doctoral dissertation (1863) is a study of Aristotle’s use of the term φαντασία in both the De anima and the Parva naturalia.

An outlier must be mentioned here: George Henry Lewes. In a fascinating book on Aristotle’s scientific writings (which “are almost unknown in England,” according to the author: 1864, viii), Lewes devotes a chapter each to the De anima, the De sensu and the rest of the Parva naturalia. Since there were no English translations of the latter works, or at least no accessible and reliable ones (see below), it is only to be expected that most of these chapters are taken up by paraphrase.

Vernacular translations did begin to appear, however, in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, and first in German. Johannes Müller (see above) was probably unaware of the recent publication of annotated translations not only of the De insomniis but also of the De memoria, De somno and De divinatione per somnum by a certain Ernst Hepner (1825).¹⁰⁰ He did, however, base his own translation on the almost equally recent edition of the Greek text of Parva naturalia 3–5—which improved upon those already existing by adopting a random scattering of variant readings from the Byzantine commentaries and other sources—by Wilhelm Adolf Becker (1823). Later German translations include those by F. A. Kreutz (1847) and Hermann Bender (1873?). The first French rendering of the Parva naturalia was published in the second volume of Jules Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire’s Psychologie d’Aristote (1846–1847). There was no full English translation before the one by William Alexander Hammond (1902), although the indefatigable Thomas Taylor’s paraphrases of all of Aristotle’s works obviously contain ones of both the De anima and the Parva naturalia (vol. 6, 1808).¹⁰¹

Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire’s and Hammond’s works are both comprehensive presentations of Aristotle’s psychology, which enclose the translations of the De anima as well as the Parva naturalia in lengthy introductions and (especially in the case of Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire) scholarly annotations. Hammond’s stated purpose was “to make easily accessible to English scholars the scientific content of these Aristotelian treatises, and thereby to facilitate inquiry into the history of philosophical and psychological ideas” (1902, ix). Stimulus to such inquiry was also provided by a number of other works on the Parva naturalia published in English around the turn of the nineteenth century: these include William Ogle’s translation of Parva naturalia 6–8 with introduction and notes (1897) and George Robert Thomson Ross’ text and translation of Parva naturalia 1–2 with introduction and commentary (1906). The latter year also saw the publication of John Beare’s Greek Theories of Elementary Cognition from Alcmaeon to Aristotle and Robert Drew Hicks’ monumental De anima edition with translation, introduction and over 400 fine-printed pages of notes. In his preface, Hicks acknowledges his debt to “the researches of the last quarter of a century,” especially the editions of Adolf Torstrik (1862) and Wilhelm Biehl (1884), but does not mention his most immediate and obvious predecessor, Georges Rodier, whose edition with French translation and notes in two hefty volumes appeared in 1900. Both Hicks and Rodier drew liberally on the Greek commentators, whose works had now been made available in the Royal Prussian Academy’s 23-volume series Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca (1882–1909). In addition, Hicks made frequent use of Giacomo Zabarella’s commentary (through which, he said, he had “made some slight acquaintance with the Latin schoolmen”: 1906, vii–viii). In 1908 the Oxford Translation was launched, under the editorship of John Alexander Smith and William David Ross: the first instalment consisted of Beare’s and (G. R. T.) Ross’ translations of the Parva naturalia.¹⁰²

In spite of this stimulus, the inquiry seems to have soon lost momentum, at least as far as the Parva naturalia are concerned. Between c. 1910 and c. 1970, scarcely more than a handful of dissertations and papers were published on particular aspects of their content (e.g. Enders 1924; Kucharski 1954; Cantin 1955; Block 1960). The few general studies of Aristotelian psychology that take the Parva naturalia into consideration all adhere to the old-fashioned systematic approach, regardless of significantly different aims and results. Thus Siwek (1930) is a Neoscholastic pleading for a solution to the problem of mental causation that escapes the difficulties besetting “interactionism” and “parallelism”; Cassirer (1932) is an offshoot of the German nineteenth-century tradition focused on the De anima but resorting to the Parva naturalia for its chapter on imagination (108–121); whereas Shute (1941) is a truly original attempt to make contemporary sense of Aristotelian psychology as the study of the principles in organisms that govern their physical and behavioural interaction with their environment. Here it is mainly for the sections on memory and reminiscence (112–115) and sleeping and waking (115–118) that the Parva naturalia are drawn upon.

But if the content of the Parva naturalia attracted only moderate interest during this period, the same cannot be said of their text and transmission. The Didot edition that was published a couple of decades after Bekker’s (vol. 3, 1854) is little more than a wipe-over of its predecessor (with a new Latin translation). But the one by Wilhelm Biehl (1898), although it makes use of the same manuscripts as Bekker’s, nevertheless marks a step forward by ordering these into two families and consulting the Greek commentaries (of which, however, only Alexander’s on the De sensu could have any significant value, and this was not yet available in a critical edition: see Wendland 1902).¹⁰³ The state of the text was further improved by occasional textual criticism by scholars such as Franz Susemihl (1885), Ingram Bywater (1888, 67–68, 1903, 242–244), John Beare (1894, 1899, 1900), Karl Eduard Bitterauf (1900) and Paul Wendland (1902). But above all it was Aurel Förster’s (1938), Hendrik Joan Drossaart Lulofs’, René Mugnier’s (1952) and Paweł Siwek’s (1961) work on the textual tradition—direct as well as indirect—that resulted in a number of new editions of individual treatises (Parva nat. 1–2 in Förster 1942; Parva nat. 3 in Drossaart Lulofs 1943; Parva nat. 4–5 in Drossaart Lulofs 1947) as well as of the whole collection (Mugnier 1953, with French translation; Ross 1955, with valuable notes and introduction; Siwek 1963, with Latin translation). Translations from the period include, in German, Rolfes (1924) and Gohlke (1947); in English, Hett (1935); in French, Tricot (1951). Later work (including translations) on the Parva naturalia is usually based on Ross’ text, sometimes on Siwek’s (see van der Eijk 1994, 94–95).

Part of the explanation for the waning interest in the content of the Parva naturalia may lie in a changed approach to Aristotelian studies in general. We have seen that in the nineteenth century these treatises were mostly valued as supplementary source texts for systematic accounts of Aristotle’s theory of the soul. But in the early twentieth century the assumption that Aristotle’s thought could be accurately captured in systematic accounts was challenged by the “developmental thesis” put forward to widespread acclaim by Werner Jaeger (1912, 1923) and first applied to Aristotle’s works on natural philosophy by Paul Gohlke (1924). If, for instance, the Parva naturalia represent, in part (as argued by Nuyens 1939 and 1948) or as a whole (as argued by Ross 1955, 15–18), an earlier phase in Aristotle’s thinking about the soul (or indeed, as argued by Block 1961, a later one), their relevance for understanding the doctrines of the De anima is unclear.¹⁰⁴ On a more general level, the “developmental thesis” added impetus to an already ongoing philologization of Aristotelian studies.

But the pendulum has swung. Over the last half century, several new translations of individual treatises have appeared, often supplied with lengthy introductions and commentaries, dealing to varying degrees with philosophical as well as philological problems, notably Richard Sorabji’s (1972, 2nd ed. 2004) English translation of treatise 2; David Gallop’s (1990, 2nd ed. 1996) English translation of treatises 3–5; Jackie Pigeaud’s (1995) French translation of treatise 5; Philip van der Eijk’s (1994) German translation of treatises 4–5; and Richard King’s (2004) German and David Bloch’s (2007) English translation of treatise 2. Bloch’s translation is based on an entirely new text, the groundwork for which is laid out in Bloch (2004) and (2008b).¹⁰⁵ Over the last five years, Italian translations with introductions and notes have appeared of treatise 1 (Cosenza 2013, with a full discussion of the whole collection in vol. 1) and treatises 6–8 (Repici 2017). Relatively recent annotated translations of the whole collection include a German one by Eugen Dönt (1997) and a French one by Pierre-Marie Morel (2000).

In addition, a small number of booklength studies of individual treatises have been produced, such as Wijsenbeek-Wijler (1978) on treatises 3–4 and King (2001) on treatises 6–7. More importantly, however, systematic treatments of themes in Aristotelian psychology (mostly sense perception) factoring in the Parva naturalia are again comme il faut: among the most noteworthy specimens of the genre are Modrak (1987); Everson (1997); Johansen (1997, 2012); Gregoric (2007); Herzberg (2011); Marmodoro (2014). There would be little point in listing even a selection of all the individual articles on subjects related to the Parva naturalia published in this period, but two collections of papers stand out as being of utmost importance, namely Lloyd and Owen (1978) and Oksenberg Rorty and Nussbaum (1992).

The pendulum swung, in part, no doubt, as a mechanical function of the growth of academic writing and publishing, but also, I think, for more subject-specific reasons. I would like to mention three. First, the fact that it has proved, in practice and perhaps in principle, impossible to establish a clear-cut chronology of Aristotle’s works has reduced the urgency of the developmental issue and opened the door to systematic studies of Aristotelian psychology again. It is not coincidental that in some of the first post-Jaegerian works to rely again on the Parva naturalia for rounding out the doctrines of the De anima, namely Kahn (1966) and Lefèvre (1972), this interpretative manoeuvre is carried out in open defiance of developmentalism.

Second, the reappraisal of Aristotle’s “zoological” works in the 1980s and 1990s, spearheaded by David M. Balme and carried on by such scholars as Wolfgang Kullmann, G. E. R. Lloyd, Allan Gotthelf and James G. Lennox, is likely to have prevailed upon the scholarly community to look at Aristotle’s psychology with a fresh pair of eyes, sensitive to the implications of the fact that it is embedded in biology.¹⁰⁶

Third, and most importantly, Aristotelian hylomorphism has once again emerged, in the eyes of some philosophers, as “a happy alternative to materialist reductionism on the one hand, Cartesian dualism on the other” (Nussbaum and Putnam 1992, 27). To be sure, there has been considerable debate about the exact description of Aristotle’s psychological hylomorphism: those philosophers who think of it as a happy alternative have all maintained that it amounts to some sort of non-reductive materialism which offers a way of accounting for mental phenomena as comfortably situated in the natural world, but have not been able to agree between themselves whether it is most accurately labelled as functionalism, supervenience theory or emergentism; others, however, have insisted that it entails some form of dualism or vitalism, in which case it would seem to be of little use to contemporary philosophy of mind, and we would be well advised to follow Myles Burnyeat’s recommendation and “junk it” (1992, 26).

This controversy has mainly played out in discussions of Aristotle’s theory of sense perception as “that which is capable of receiving the perceptible forms without their matter” (De an. 2.12, 424a17–19), where various positions on a spectrum ranging from “literalism” to “spiritualism” have been ascribed to Aristotle,¹⁰⁷ where “literalism” is the view that the reception of perceptible qualities crucially involves the physical alteration of the sense organs, and “spiritualism” is the view that the “reception” of perceptible qualities is only mental (or “cognitive,” as the ancient commentators would say), and thus involves no physical alteration of the sense organs (although a certain physical make-up of the respective sense organ is a necessary condition for sense perception to occur). An intermediate view, according to which the sense organs do not receive the perceptible qualities as such but are modified in the same proportions, has been defended by a number of scholars, most fully by Caston (2005, with references to earlier accounts at 247 n7; see also the overview in Caston 2006, 317–330).¹⁰⁸

Somewhat crudely put, then, on a literalist reading, Aristotle’s theory of sense perception involves an account of different types of physical change as well as of different psychic activities: it does not reduce the one to the other, but pays close attention to their interrelations (although exactly how these interrelations are defined may be debatable). On a spiritualist reading, Aristotle’s theory simply assumes that there are physical entities endowed with consciousness: sense perception is accounted for exclusively as a psychic activity. Which seems to disqualify the theory for serious consideration by contemporary philosophers of mind.¹⁰⁹ However that may be, I think it is fair to say that the controversy has been chiefly to do with the correct interpretation of Aristotle. Obviously, with so much disagreement over the features of Aristotle’s theory, it is not so easy to adjudicate what sort of contemporary theory of mind should qualify as “Aristotelian.” It remains to be seen whether any such theory with an impact comparable to that of Trendelenburg’s or Brentano’s will be forthcoming.