This volume is the first in English to provide a full, systematic investigation into Aristotle's criticisms of earlier Greek theories of the soul from the perspective of his theory of scientific explanation. Some interpreters of the De Anima have seen Aristotle's criticisms of Presocratic, Platonic, and other views about the soul as unfair or dialectical, but Jason W. Carter argues that Aristotle's criticisms are in fact a justified attempt to test the adequacy of earlier theories in terms of the theory of scientific knowledge he advances in the Posterior Analytics. Carter proposes a new interpretation of Aristotle's confrontations with earlier psychology, showing how his reception of other Greek philosophers shaped his own hylomorphic psychology and led him to adopt a novel dualist theory of the soul–body relation. His book will be important for students and scholars of Aristotle, ancient Greek psychology, and the history of the mind–body problem.

Both Aristotle and moral psychology have been flourishing areas of philosophical inquiry in recent years. This volume aims to bring the two streams of research together, offering fresh Aristotelian insights into moral psychology and philosophy of action, and applying philosophical sensibility to the reading of Aristotelian texts.

Aristotle initiated the systematic investigation of perception, the emotions, memory, desire and action, developing his own account of these phenomena and their interconnection. The Undivided Self aims to gain a philosophical understanding of his views and to examine how far they withstand critical scrutiny. Aristotle's account, it is argued, constitutes a philosophically live alternative to conventional post-Cartesian thinking about psychological phenomena and their place in a material world. Charles offers a way to dissolve, rather than solve, the mind-body problem we have inherited.

This book reconstructs the theory of signification implicit in Aristotle’s De Interpretatione and its psychological background in his writing De Anima, a project often envisioned by scholars but never systematically undertaken. I begin by explaining what sort of phonetic material, according to Aristotle, can be a significans and a phônê. To that end, I provide a physiological account of which animal sounds count as phônê, as well as a psychological evaluation of the cognitive content of the phônai under consideration in De Interpretatione: names, verbs, and assertive sentences. I then turn to noêmata, which, for Aristotle, are the psychological reference and significata of names, verbs and assertive sentences. I explain what, for Aristotle, are the logical properties a significatum must have in order to be signified by the phonetic material of a name, verb or assertive sentence, and why noêmata can fulfil those logical conditions. Finally, I elucidate the significans-significatum relation without making use of the modern semantic triangle. This approach is consonant with Aristotle’s methodology and breaks new ground by exploring the connection between the linguistic and psychological aspects of Aristotle’s theory of signification.

A fresh interpretation of this important and widely misunderstood concept as an acquired ability to make principles and essences intelligible.

Argues that Aristotle's psychology is shaped by his critical reception of earlier theories of soul, including the Presocratic and Platonic.