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.

• Table of Contents
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Aristotle
• Method and Nutritive Soul in Aristotle’s De Anima II,4
• Nutrition and Hylomorphism in Aristotle
• The Female Contribution to Generation and Nutritive Soul in Aristotle’s Embryology
• Why do not Animals Grow on Without End?
• Looking for the Formative Power in Aristotle’s Nutritive Soul
• Aristotle and his Medical Precursors on Digestion and Nutrition
• Aristotle on the Role of Heat in Plant Life
• Aristotelianism
• Reading and Sleep in Pseudo-Aristotle, Problemata XVIII,7
• Dividing an Apple
• Is Nutrition a Sufficient Condition for Life?
• Digestive Problems
• Magnetism and Nutrition
• From Food to Elements and Humors
• Standstill or Death
• Antonio Ponce de Santacruz on Nutrition and the Question of Emergence
• Index locorum
• Index rerum