Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Aristotle begins by raising the question of the seat of life in the body ("while it is clear that [the soul's] essential reality cannot be corporeal, yet manifestly it must exist in some bodily part which must be one of those possessing control over the members") and arrives at the answer that the heart is the primary organ of soul, and the central organ of nutrition and sensation (with which ...
Aristotle divides the art of poetry into verse drama (comedy, tragedy, and the satyr play), lyric poetry, and epic. The genres all share the function of mimesis, or imitation of life, but differ in three ways that Aristotle describes: There are differences in music rhythm, harmony, meter, and melody.
The Parva Naturalia (a conventional Latin title first used by Giles of Rome: "short works on nature") are a collection of seven works by Aristotle, which discuss natural phenomena involving the body and the soul. They form parts of Aristotle's biology. The individual works are as follows (with links to online English translations):
Little is known about Aristotle's life. He was born in the city of Stagira in northern Greece during the Classical period. His father, Nicomachus, died when Aristotle was a child, and he was brought up by a guardian. At around eighteen years old, he joined Plato's Academy in Athens and remained there until the age of thirty seven (c. 347 BC).
Therefore, we must seek out such operations of the soul to determine what kind of nature it has. From a consideration of the opinions of his predecessors, a soul, he concludes, will be that in virtue of which living things have life. Book II contains his scientific determination of the nature of the soul, an element of his biology. By dividing ...
The set nature of species, and thus the absoluteness of creatures' places in the great chain, came into question during the 18th century. The dual nature of the chain, divided yet united, had always allowed for seeing creation as essentially one continuous whole, with the potential for overlap between the links. [1]
Lyric poems often employed highly varied poetic meters. The most famous of all lyric poets were the so-called "Nine Lyric Poets". [21] Of all the lyric poets, Sappho of Lesbos (c. 630 – c. 570 BC) was by far the most widely revered. In antiquity, her poems were regarded with the same degree of respect as the poems of Homer. [22]
The primary source of knowledge on the question is the Poetics of Aristotle. Aristotle was able to gather first-hand documentation from theater performance in Attica, which is inaccessible to scholars today. His work is therefore invaluable for the study of ancient tragedy, even if his testimony is open to doubt on some points.