A Question of Life and Death. Living and Dying in Medieval Philosophy

Living and dying are essential concepts in Aristotelian natural philosophy and psychology. It is then no surprise that when the libri naturales were translated into Latin from the twelfth century onwards, this gave birth to an extensive interpretative tradition in the Latin West in which life and death as conceived by Aristotle were theorized and reflected upon, for example in the numerous commentaries of the De Anima but also of the Parva Naturalia. Yet the medieval inquiry into living and dying is not limited to natural philosophy nor the Aristotelian tradition but can also be found in ethics, metaphysics, theology, medicine and others domains. Many topics are addressed in the volume: radical moisture and the possibility of increasing lifespan, suicide, essence of life, contrast between life of the body and life of the soul, future life, and so on. The volume is also a hommage to Pieter De Leemans, an eminent specialist of the Latin translations of Aristotle’s books on natural philosophy, who was the intitiator of this scientific project.