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John Buridan, John Buridan’s Questions on Aristotle’s De anima—Iohannis Buridani Quaestiones in Aristotelis De anima, Gyula Klima, Peter G. Sobol, Peter Hartman, and Jack Zupko (eds.), Springer, 2023, 998pp., $139.99 (hbk), ISBN 9783030944322.
Reviewed by Jordan Lavender, Texas A&M University
To read this excellent edition and translation of John Buridan’s Questions on Aristotle’s De Anima is to encounter two things at once: an intellectual landscape remote from both ancient hylomorphism and post-medieval European philosophy and a bridge between the two.[1] Like Aristotle, Buridan thinks that all living things are animated by souls. But these souls are in many ways unlike the souls of Aristotle’s De anima. According to Buridan, the souls of non-human animals are themselves a kind of homogeneous substance, composed of extended parts spread throughout the matter of a living thing (QDA 91, 195–197). The arrangement of the integral parts of a living thing and the sensible properties of those parts depend on the soul as their efficient cause, but not as their formal…
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