In the doctoral project “Aristotle on Parts of the Soul” Francesca Pedriali examines the notion of a part of soul and its relevance in the Aristotelian account of the soul. The aim of the project is to highlight the methodological relevance of the notion of a part in Aristotle’s scientific account of the soul and to justify the systematic use of this notion not only in De Anima, but also in the biological and zoological works of the Corpus Aristotelicum.

Research

In the doctoral project “Aristotle on Parts of the Soul’ Francesca Pedriali examines the notion of a part of soul and its relevance in the Aristotelian account of the soul. The aim of the project is to highlight the methodological relevance of the notion of a part in Aristotle’s scientific account of the soul and to justify the systematic use of this notion not only in De Anima, but also in the biological and zoological works of the Corpus Aristotelicum. The underlying idea is that the notion of part of soul plays a relevant role in the account of different types of soul because of the particular ontological structure that souls exhibit.

The approach is therefore distinct from the standard analysis of the Aristotelian partition of the soul insofar as the main focus of the proposed analysis goes beyond the conceptual relation between parts and capacities of the soul (the internal structure of the soul, “horizontal analysis”) and the conceptual relation between parts and kinds of soul (the classificatory role of parts of soul, “vertical analysis”). The goal of the project is to gain a fundamental understanding of why the account of the parts of the soul is for Aristotle the most appropriate account of the soul and what precise role these parts play in the Aristotelian scientific account of the soul.