Abstract
The JSVMR, the last among the short treatises on nature gathered under the collective title Parva Naturalia, addresses four main topics: life, death, the stages of life and respiration. Presented in this way, and without further specification, its content admittedly seems incoherent and unspecified; yet, in this work, Aristotle is careful to provide us with all necessary conceptual links to tie all of these topics together. A close examination reveals that its main topic is ‘Life’, addressed in terms of a soul-body compound which passes through different life stages before reaching death, and fulfils its needs through a variety of physiological processes carried out by several organic parts.
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Notes
- 1.
In contrast to the utterly explicit reference found at JSVMR 14.474b12.
- 2.
See e.g. 14.474b9, 22.478a26–28 and 478a35–478b1.
- 3.
μέθοδος, Long. 6.467b5–9.
- 4.
- 5.
For an excellent introduction to the PN and its reception, see Bydén and Radovic (2018).
- 6.
Sens. 1.436a15 mentions “respiration (i.e. inhalation) and exhalation” (ἀναπνοὴ καὶ ἐκπνοή) but contains no reference to longevity and shortness of life.
- 7.
See p. 3 above.
- 8.
- 9.
See Repici (2017) p. 121 and Miller (2018) p. 242, n. on the title. Still this admission seems not to prevent Repici from speaking of a “relativa autonomia” (p. 121, n. 1) among the treatises. Such a splitting approach, to be sure, has also its practical consequences: some confusion has arisen as to how these texts should be cited and to what extent a particular title corresponds to the content to which it refers. Take the following simple example: the TLG online database, apart from dividing the text into two distinct sections, the Juv. and the Resp., presents the former under the title “De juventute et senectute De vita et morte”, thus raising the reasonable question as to why the second “De” is capitalised. What is more, when one browses through this online text, one finds only the section 467b10–470b5 but not the section 478b22–480b30, to which scholars who prefer to split the work into three parts refer. Allow me to mention one more example of this confusion among the many encountered in modern scholarly literature: in the table of contents of the monumental and insightful volume by Lanza and Vegetti (1971), which provides an Italian annotated translation of Aristotle’s biological works, our text is entitled merely “La respirazione” (p. 1314). But when one turns to the relevant page, one finds the whole of all twenty seven chapters comprehended under the title “La respirazione”, which is accompanied by the subtitle “La giovinezza e la vecchiezza La respirazione – La vita e la morte”. Cf. the online version of the List of Abbreviations used in the OCD, 4th edition, in which only Resp. is mentioned.
- 10.
See Trizio (2018) pp. 161–163.
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Korobili, G. (2022). Introduction. In: Aristotle. On Youth and Old Age, Life and Death, and Respiration 1-6. Studies in the History of Philosophy of Mind, vol 30. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99966-7_1
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