E-Book Content
9 780198 238645 ARISTOTLE'S THEORY OF MATERIAL SUBSTANCE Heat and Pneuma, Form and Soul GAD FREUDENTHAL CLARENDON PRESS ' OXFORD This book has been printed digitally ami produced in (I standard spedJu:atiol1 This book is dedicated with affection in order to ensure its continuing uvailability OXFORD VNIVERSlTY PRESS Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford: It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan South Korea Poland Portugal Singapore Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Gad Freudenthal 1995 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) Reprinted 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, ill allY form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate tllis book in any other binding or cover And you must impose this same condition on any acquirer ISBN 978-0-19-823864-5 to the beloved memory of my father, Heinz Freudenthal 7"T, and of my mother, Renate Freudenthal, nee Engel 7"T, and to Emmanuel, Michael, and Nine Acknowledgements Acknowledgernen ts My foremost debt is to an institution. The enquiry that has led up to this book followed a long and occasionally tortuous path whose telos was not always within sight. As a piece of research whose outcome was uncertain, it required suitable, secure institutional conditions. In France, the government-sponsored Centre national de La recherche scientifique (CNRS), which I joined in 1982 as a Permanent Research Fellow, affords precisely such conditions: a tenure position and the possibility of pursuing research as an exclusive activity, even in the absence of immediately tangible results. This is a privileged situation-nowadays most younger scholars have to devise their research programmes according to the narrow timetable imposed by the constraints of tenure renewal-which I appreciate and for which I am very grateful. My sense of gratitude for having had the possibility of pursuing a professional activity guided only by a 'desire to know' is heightened by the painful awareness that outside the ivory tower of academia, in France alone, more than three million persons are unemployed. To Monsieur Roshdi Rashed (Paris), my former directeur de recherche at the CNRS, I am much indebted for his constant and unfailing support, despite his preference for me to follow him to his own chosen fields of study. Amos Funkenstein (The University of California at Berkeley and Tel-Aviv University) persuaded me to cast the results of my research on Aristotle into book-form. I express to him my warmest thanks for the friendly impulse and the encouragement he gave me, without which this book would not have passed from potentiality into actuality. As a manuscript, this book was read by several anonymous referees (one of whom later revealed herself as Mary Louise Gill of the University of Pittsburgh