Substance, body and soul: Aristotelian investigations

TLDR: This tough-minded study of Aristotle's views on personal identity will prove to be attractive and valuable to a wide range of readers, including scientists, politicians, and historians of the twentieth century and of its science.

Abstract: With the exception of one article by David Gaunt which originally appeared in Swedish, all of Imhof's choices were first published in French, so the translations into German are unlikely to be of particular use to English-speaking historians. However, Imhof has also written an excellent sixty-five-page introduction to his subject and provides a useful thirty-page bibliography of recent work in historical human biology. Unusual in collections of essays, the volume is indexed. Historians of psychology will find this tough-minded study of Aristotle's views on personal identity greatly rewarding, although by no means easy reading. Aristotle, it is argued, sees the world as populated by individual material objects, rather than by their parts or by universals: material objects are identical with their particular essence, not a combination of form and matter. The author traces the consequences of this theory as applied to the person, a substance whose essence is his soul, and to the relationships between body and mind as expressed in perception, sensation, and thought. These investigations, even if not all equally convincing, have the great merit of taking Aristotle seriously, as a philosopher-scientist worth arguing with, rather than as a historical totem-pole to be noticed, respected, and then preserved as an ineffective curiosity. Five British scientists who turned to socialism at about the time of the First World War are featured in this book by an American-born sociologist: J. By their writings and publicity on science and socialism they became known as leading intellectuals, and they here relate the stories of their lives and of their times through their own eyes. One ofthe absorbing aspects is the difference between the individuals' approaches to their common interests, and their varying backgrounds. It is a scholarly work which will prove to be attractive and valuable to a wide range of readers, including scientists , politicians, and historians of the twentieth century and of its science. Dr. Spink has specialized in infectious diseases for almost fifty years and now presents a history of their control. There are three sections. The first, 'Background of the control and treatment of infectious diseases', includes very pedestrian chapters on early concepts of infection and its control, and the development of bacteriology, immunology, and virology, together with a survey of the evolution of public health in Great Britain and the U.S.A., and of the World Health Organization. The second 483