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Aristotle, De Motu Animalium: a new critical edition of the Greek text by Oliver Primavesi, with an English translation by Ben Morison, and an Introduction by Christof Rapp and Oliver Primavesi, Oxford University Press, 2023, 238pp., $70.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780198874461.
Reviewed by Pavel Gregoric, Institute of Philosophy, Zagreb, Croatia
Aristotle’s De motu animalium (MA) is a short treatise, interesting both philosophically and textually. Philosophically, it will be intriguing to most readers because it contains Aristotle’s answer to the question of how the soul moves the body. Very briefly, mental states that represent desired or unwanted things are alterations in the central organ accompanied by microscopic heatings or coolings which are converted into mechanical impulses that spread from the central organ and cause the limbs to move. The hard problem is, of course, to determine what makes alterations in the central organ’s mental states, but that is something Aristotle has already settled in the treatise De anima, or so he believes. In MA he simply assumes that mental states “immediately have their being as alterations…
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