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

Abstract

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 on the De anima but also on the Parva Naturalia. Yet, medieval inquiry into living and dying is not limited to natural philosophy nor to the Aristotelian tradition, but can also be found in ethics, metaphysics, theology, and medicine, and in other domains.