This volume is a detailed study of the concept of the nutritive capacity of the soul and its
actual manifestation in living bodies (plants animals humans) in Aristotle and
Aristotelianism. Aristotle's innovative analysis of the nutritive faculty has laid the
intellectual foundation for the increasing appreciation of nutrition as a prerequisite for the
maintenance of life and health that can be observed in the history of Greek thought. According
to Aristotle apart from nutrition the nutritive part of the soul is also responsible for or
interacts with many other bodily functions or mechanisms such as digestion growth
reproduction sleep and the innate heat. After Aristotle these concepts were used and further
developed by a great number of Peripatetic philosophers commentators on Aristotle and Arabic
thinkers until early modern times. This volume is the first of its kind to provide an in-depth
survey of the development of this rather philosophical concept from Aristotle to early modern
thinkers. It is of key interest to scholars working on classical medieval and early modern
psycho-physiological accounts of living things historians and philosophers of science
biologists with interests in the history of science and generally students of the history of
philosophy and science.
