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This monograph deals with the philosophical approach of thirteenth-century masters to concrete, practical manifestations of 'quantum ad naturalia' in human lives in their commentaries on Aristotle’s works on natural philosophy, both his genuine works and those then considered genuine. It inquires into what they deemed worthy of philosophical debate regarding this topic and how they tackled it. The first of the two volumes describes the cultural surroundings, the scholars’ way of approaching the topic, and their discourses on the peculiarity (singularity, unity, consistency) of humankind and on its internal differentiation according to gender, stage of life, social stratification, and differences due to ethnic status or geographic (climatic) diversity. This is the first comprehensive source-based study of the subject; it draws heavily on unedited texts.
The Latin Middle Ages were characterised by a vast array of different representations of nature. These conceptualisations of the natural world were developed according to the specific requirements of many different disciplines, with the consequent result of producing a fragmentation of images of nature. Despite this plurality, two main tendencies emerged. On the one hand, the natural world was seen as a reflection of God’s perfection, teleologically ordered and structurally harmonious. On the other, it was also considered as a degraded version of the spiritual realm – a world of impeccable ideas, separate substances, and celestial movers. This book focuses on this tension between order and randomness, and idealisation and reality of nature in the Middle Ages. It provides a cutting-edge profile of the doctrinal and semantic richness of the medieval idea of nature, and also illustrates the structural interconnection among learned and scientific disciplines in the medieval period, stressing the fundamental bond linking together science and philosophy, on the one hand, and philosophy and theology, on the other. This book will appeal to scholars and students alike interested in Medieval European History, Theology, Philosophy, and Science.
Philosophical controversy over non-human animals extends further back than many realize -- before Utilitarianism and Darwinism to the very genesis of philosophy. This volume examines the richness and complexity of that long history. Twelve essays trace the significance of animals from Greek and Indian antiquity through the Islamic and Latin medieval traditions, to Renaissance and early modern thought, ending with contemporary notions about animals. Two main questions emerge throughout the volume: what capacities can be ascribed to animals, and how should we treat them? Notoriously ungenerous attitudes towards animals' mental lives and ethics status, found for instance in Aristotle and Descartes, are shown to have been more nuanced than often supposed, while remarkable defenses of benevolence towards animals are unearthed in late antiquity, India, the Islamic world, and Kant. Other chapters examine cannibalism and vegetarianism in Renaissance thought, and the scientific testing of animals. A series of interdisciplinary reflections sheds further light on human attitudes towards animals, looking at their depiction in visual artworks from China, Africa, and Europe, as well as the rich tradition of animal fables beginning with Aesop.
From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, new anatomical investigations of the brain and the nervous system, together with a renewed interest in comparative anatomy, allowed doctors and philosophers to ground their theories on sense perception, the emergence of human intelligence, and the soul/body relationship in modern science. They investigated the anatomical structures and the physiological processes underlying the rise, differentiation, and articulation of human cognitive activities, and looked for the "anatomical roots" of the specificity of human intelligence when compared to other forms of animal sensibility. This edited volume focuses on medical and philosophical debates on human intelligence and animal perception in the early modern age, providing fresh insights into the influence of medical discourse on the rise of modern philosophical anthropology. Contributions from distinguished historians of philosophy and medicine focus on sixteenth-century zoological, psychological, and embryological discourses on man; the impact of mechanism and comparative anatomy on philosophical conceptions of body and soul; and the key status of sensibility in the medical and philosophical enlightenment.
In The Political Animal in Medieval Philosophy Juhana Toivanen investigates the foundations of human social life through the Aristotelian notion of ‘political animal’, as it was used in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
Explores how similarities and differences between humans and animals were understood by medieval theologians, and their significance.
This study examines Thomas Aquinas’s contribution to the systematic field of animal philosophy. It applies various models from the current philosophical debate (especially from that concerning the mind of animals) as interpretative aids to tap the potential of the Thomistic approach. Thomas draws a clear line of demarcation between animals and human beings (= anthropological difference). However, he also considers it important to work out the similarities between humans and animals, insofar as they are both so-called animalia, i.e., living beings possessing senses (= animal conformance). His philosophical deliberations concerning animals have a methodological function as well, namely to highlight the distinct capacities of human beings. Thus, for Thomas, the reflection on animals is a key instrument in dealing with anthropological questions.
Does a plant shrink at night and swell in the day, like an animal breathing in and out? For a long time, the Galenic concept of spiritus provided a causal explanation for human and animal life and perception. Albert the Great (1200-1280), whose honorific acknowledges among other things his pioneering work on biology, extended the concept to plants. This is only one of the remarkable concepts studied in this book, the first comparative study of Albert's concept of spiritus. It unveils the Arabic roots of his early psychophysiology and the original developments found in his mature Aristotelian paraphrases.
This book contains a collection of papers devoted to the problems of body, mind and soul in medieval Europe between 1200 and 1420. Modern discussions of the mind-body relationship seldom look back into the past further than the psycho-somatic dualism of Descartes which started the mechanistic approach in biology and medicine. The authors of the volume go beyond that fault line to investigate the tradition of medieval natural philosophy and its ancient sources and analyze the issues forming a borderland between physiology and psychology. They also demonstrate that the medieval tradition was rich and diverse for it offered a wide variety of the discussed problems as well as the methodological approaches. This volume is the first attempt to cover a diversity of topics and methods employed in the medieval debates on body, mind and soul as well as their interrelationships. The Embodied Soul is a must-have for all those interested in puzzling dilemmas of how a living organism functions and how its inner life can be explained as well as for all those interested in the history of thought in general. Chapter 14 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.
A much-maligned feature of ancient and medieval political thought is its tendency to appeal to nature to establish norms for human communities. From Aristotle's claim that humans are "political animals" to Aquinas' invocation of "natural law," it may seem that pre-modern philosophers were all too ready to assume that whatever is natural is good, and that just political arrangements must somehow be natural. The papers in this collection show that this assumption is, at best, too crude. From very early, for instance in the ancient sophists' contrast between nomos and physis, there was recognition that political arrangements may be precisely artificial, not natural, and it may be questioned whether even such supposed naturalists as Aristotle in fact adopt the quick inference from "natural" to "good." The papers in this volume trace the complex interrelations between nature and such concepts as law, legitimacy, and justice, covering a wide historical range stretching from Plato and the Sophists to Aristotle, Hellenistic philosophy, Cicero, the Neoplatonists Plotinus and Porphyry, ancient Christian thinkers, and philosophers of both the Islamic and Christian Middle Ages.