The Embodied Soul: Aristotelian Psychology and Physiology in Medieval Europe between 1200 and 1420

Description

ref:7.1-40: "Why Philosophers Father Foolish Children: Peter of Spain, Albert the Great, and James of Viterbo on the Transmission of Intellectual Qualities"

related to the Latin adage "qui bonus est in studio, pravus est in foro et in generatione vel venereo actu" that St. Albert the Great cites (cf. "scholasticus bonus, malus politicus").

ref:6.16:

In his [St. Albert's] commentary on the Physica , the generation of twins is directly linked to the generation of monstrously deformed people, such as the one born “in our times” (tempora nostra) who had eleven mouths, eleven tongues and twenty-two incompletely formed lips [!!]. This malformed foetus was stillborn.

5. Pygmies, Twins, Monsters: Human Nature and Its Borderlines in Albert the Great

03/27/255. Pygmies, Twins, Monsters: Human Nature and Its Borderlines in Albert the Great : 180

Albert did not see any pygmies; nor is he likely to have known people who saw pygmies. He relied on the accounts that he found, such as the passages about the tiny horses of pygmies and their war with cranes in Aristotle’s Historia animalium. A chapter in Augustine’s De civitate Dei which describes certain races that descend from Noah contains some other details that appear in Albert, for example, that “women conceive in their fifth year and do not live beyond their eighth.”

6. Why Philosophers Father Foolish Children: Peter of Spain, Albert the Great, and James of Viterbo on the Transmission of Intellectual Qualities

03/19/256. Why Philosophers Father Foolish Children: Peter of Spain, Albert the Great, and James of Viterbo on the Transmission of Intellectual Qualities : 245

wise men are highly fatigued by their study of the sciences

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.

Marek Gensler , professor of Philosophy at the University of Łódź. He specializes in history of medieval philosophy, focusing on philosophy of nature in the fourteenth-century philosophy. He has published several studies on Antonius Andreae and Walter Burley, and critical editions.

Monika Mansfeld , postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Philosophy and History at the University of Łódź in Poland. In her work, she focuses on the late medieval philosophical commentaries on Aristotle’s works, especially on logic and metaphysics of so-called Parisian nominalism and realist natural philosophy.

Monika Michałowska , university professor at the Medical University of Łódź. Her research focuses on late medieval ethics and theology, especially concepts of the will. She works on Richard Kilvington’s philosophy and theology. She has published critical editions of Richard Kilvington’s Questions on the Ethics and onthe Sentences.