Human life manifestations according to Aristotle commentaries

Research project P 14652 Human life manifestations according to Aristotle commentaries Theodor W. KÖHLER 26.6.2000 The scholastic philosophical reflection on man is a most essential stage in the history of the occidental efforts towards a scholarly understanding of man as such. Certain particulars, especially the most famous doctrines of the high scholastic period, have already been elaborated by modem research and are nowadays reasonably well understood, but a systematic investigation of that discourse, based on a broad inventory of the sources, is a task that used to be neglected. Two previous projects, which are now completed, have enabled us to start eliminating the said deficiency. The theoretical prerequisites of the discourse according to the views of the medieval scholars themselves are presented and thoroughly discussed in a monograph which is now in press. The work already done in the course of those projects, especially the collection of a great wealth of source materials and investigation of its background, is a sound basis for the. following step, which must. now be tackled. Our next aim is to go into the practical `everyday` aspects of the discourse. The project we now envisage is a first step towards the grouping, presentation and evaluation of the partly unpublished source evidence, illustrating the manifold trends of scholastic philosophical thinking in our field. It will help scholars to see and appreciate those materials in the context of the history of ideas to which they belong. First of all we ask `What did the magistri qualify as the actual ingredients of humanity in practice, and how did they define and understand human nature in terms of the concrete phenomena manifesting it?` Under the given limitations of such a project, its scope should comprise just one literary genus. So we have chosen the Aristotle commentaries, because they are particularly instructive and because we`ve done a lot of preparatory work on them already. We want to study the development of philosophical thinking in the commentaries both from a historical and from a systematic viewpoint. One of our aims is to achieve a synopsis showing the merits and the shortcomings of those medieval scholars` efforts, - and to enable the reader to appreciate their importance in the light of modem approaches (e.g. the current bioethical discussions on the essentials of what we call human). The questions we intend do deal with are perennial philosophical challenges, so we should sort out what the heyday of scholastic philosophy can teach us on such matters.