Aristotle. On Youth and Old Age, Life and Death, and Respiration 1-6

This book is devoted to the last part of Aristotle’s collection of short treatises known today as the Parva Naturalia, i.e. the treatise On Youth and Old Age, on Life and Death, on Respiration. In the three main sections of the book, the author offers a translation, a commentary and a thorough analysis of this work. The author argues in favour of the unity of the work and contextualises its ideas within Aristotle’s corpus and the medical tradition of his time. After an Introduction to the nature of the work and its significance for the history of natural philosophy and science, a new English translation follows, along with a detailed commentary of Chapters 1-6, which combines philosophical discussion with philological observations. 

The book includes four interpretive essays, which tackle problems related to the whole treatise on a more philosophical basis, including questions about the structure and unity of the work, the organisation of the material, Aristotle’s methodological principles, his aims and target audience as well as the relevance of his selected themes to the thematic agenda of some Hippocratic writings. This book is of interest to students and researchers in Aristotle’s psychophysiology, and his views about the embodied mind, as well as to anyone concerned with the history of natural philosophy and science more generally. 

• Aristotle’s natural philosophy
• Aristotle on body and soul
• Aristotle’s style of writing
• Life and death
• Theory vs. empirical observation
• Youth and old age
• Parva naturalia
• On Youth and Old Age, Life and Death
• Phainomena vs. Logos
• interpreting the natural world
• Aristotle on Authority and Persuasion
• Aristotle and Medicine and Philosophy
• Aristotle and Hippocratic writings
• role of ‘Paradigm’ in On Youth and Old Age, Life and Death
• interpretation of phainomena-logos
• relationship between reason, experience and experiment

• Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

  Giouli Korobili

Giouli Korobili is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Post-doctoral Fellow at the University of Utrecht. She studied Classical Philology and Philosophy at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (BA), at the University of Ioannina (MA) and at Humboldt University of Berlin (PhD). She has contributed to a number of edited volumes on Aristotle, ancient medicine and Byzantine Aristotelian commentators. She has completed a project on the first edition of Theodorus Metochites’ Paraphrasis of Aristotle’s PA I at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and she is currently working on a book dealing with medical analogies employed in ancient Greek and Roman meteorological accounts.