didn't understand squat beyond that the soul is probably inseparable, moved by wind moves other things and that reason and striving moves stuff.

You can't really understand De Anima well without understanding the Greek natural-scientific project, the quest for the underlying phuseis (natures), ousiai (substances, true beings), hupokeimena (substrata, under-lying realities) AND the appropriate episteme (means of truly knowing, true knowledge or "being acquainted with") for accessing, acquiring, and ultimate communicating them. Aristotle is a culmination and formalization of this tradition and the end of its really productive phase, and he passes through the logical and epistemological school of Socrates and Plato, which supposes that reasoned discourse can sort of "train the mind's eye" onto the things themselves, but the final leap of recognition is not itself a discursive act but a direct "intuiting" or gazing-upon.

This works because they believe that the mind is not just "built for" recognizing and "properly naming" the things themselves, but that the notions in the mind corresponding to the things in the world "participate in" (literally, partake of, draw from) the REAL, ultimate things in themselves, in a higher realm. So when you are "seeing the form of something" (the Greek for "form" is built from the verb "to see," so it's literally "the thing seen," but also "the underlying KIND of the thing you're seeing, 'in' the particular instance of it you're looking at"), BOTH the particular thing (say, a dog, or the justness of an action) AND your mind's conception of the under-lying "kind" that gives the particular thing its what-it-is (so, dogness, or animality, or life, or justice, or simply being, or oneness) are "drawing from," "partaking of," "borrowing from" the same ultimate source (phusis, ousia, hupokeimenon), which is the form. Thus correct recognition of a thing's thingness is recognition in the sense of re-cognition, literally a "remembering" of what you ALREADY know, since it is the structure of being in which you yourself also participate.

Aristotle is training that on a simple, obvious, and important question: What is it that makes things alive as opposed to dead? In his Physics and elsewhere he considers non-animated things. Now he's considering animated things, literally things with an anima, a soul, the "breath of life" "animating" them in a way that (evidently, or at least hypothetically) makes them different from things WITHOUT this animation. He is applying the Greek natural-scientific method, inflected by Socrates and Plato, and then by his own logicist inflection of Socrates and Plato, to this question.

>>24520032

He is not proposing a framework arbitrarily. He's trying to SHOW you, to POINT OUT to you (apo-deixis), in the form of logically consequent logoi (propositions, perspicuous statements-about), what necessarily or at least reasonably in an earnest inquiry into the that-which-animates-animated-things. It's not a big baroque mess for the sake of a big baroque mess. He's trying to reconcile empirical observations, which have "brute facticity" and broad pre-scientific agreement, with logical necessity. For example, it is a brute fact that plants do something dead matter does not: they grow, regularly. Another brute fact about them: when their growth is "interrupted" or queered in some way, they "tend" to "right" it or "compensate for" it. They have some "animating" drive, something that makes them do things that inanimate matter (which they take up into themselves and which their animating principle, as it were, "instrumentalizes") does not do on its own. But then we have another brute fact: animals ALSO have this principle, they do what plants do, so it stands to reason (so Aristotle claims, at least) that animals have the "plant soul" AND something else, another soul. And so on for humans: we do what plants do, we do what animals do, but we also reason abstractly. So it stands to reason that we have a third level of soul.

This is not the same as the Christian and (likely) Platonic notion of an individual soul. This is a sober analysis and hierarchical typology of animated things qua animated things. This is why Aristotle is perfectively tentative and exploratory about things that exceed the limits of empirical observation and lays out various possibilities, although he ultimately goes with what seems likeliest to him: humans (and certainly animals), being sufficiently (albeit hypothetically) explained as a concatenation of soul-levels, do not "need" an additional, unobservable immortal and personal spirit to explain their empirically observed activity (living, growing, moving, self-sustaining, behaving according to type, ultimately perishing). Thus Aristotle is generally thought not to have a doctrine of a soul in the modern sense, something that caused problems for Christian and Islamic Aristotelians.

The most interesting part is how Aristotle reconciles the highest level of ensouled beings' activity, reasoning, with the existence of "reason itself" as the top of the world-hierarchy. A kind of macrocosm/microcosm (the world as one big thinking, living thing) is tantalizingly implicit. When we philosophize (engage in serene theoria, contemplation), we mirror the world itself in its perfection, our house (body) is in order and its crown jewel shines in perfect conformity with the world itself. Not quite nondualism but as I said tantalizingly implicit.

>>24520032
>>24520034
Thanks for the effort desu anon-sama. I'll honor it with a proper read once i am finished with my workpass.

the most important thing to understand is the agent intellect, which no one actually understands anyway

>>24519953 (OP)
anon was blessed by a drive-by of Ristanon

>>24520286
qrd?

>>24520300
In case you're not familiar with who Rist-anon is, he's a prolific expert on Aristotle who, every once in a blue moon, swings by to drop a several character-limited effortposts on random Aristotle threads. If you've been on /lit/ for a while and look at Aristotle threads, you've probably seen him before. I call him Ristanon because he tends to recommend Rist as the best introduction to Aristotle, but he's generally recognizable because of 1) the sheer quality of his efforts posts; and 2) what he specializes in with the lens that he uses (i.e. Aristotle's phenomenological method uniting the sciences). I suspect that he might also share a passion for philosophy of science and German idealism, although this is a stretch and these could be several other posters. He is by far one of my favorite, if not *the* favorite, effortposter on this board, and his commentary can escalate your appreciation of Socratic philosophy in general.

Here's a non-exhaustive list of some of his best works (that I'm fairly certain are his):

>>https://warosu.org/lit/thread/21242275#p21243293
>>https://warosu.org/lit/thread/20196791#p20196901
>>https://warosu.org/lit/thread/19342351#p19342540
>>https://warosu.org/lit/thread/21935043#21936492
>>https://warosu.org/lit/thread/22363097#p22365502
>>https://warosu.org/lit/thread/23121996#p23123404
>>https://warosu.org/lit/thread/23224675#p23225517

>>24520304
finally. good philosophy

>>24520311
I know. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, all he does are drive-bys. I've been meaning to ask him some questions for years now, but he never returns to the scene of the crime. It's the perfect crime.