On Life and Death
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- No scanning noise detected (automatic measure over the whole text, not checked by hand)
- Extent:
- ~1,900 words · 9 passages
Cite this work
- APAAristotle. (n.d.). On Life and Death. Digital reproduction: SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/aristotle/on-life-and-death
- MLAAristotle. On Life and Death. Digital reproduction, SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/aristotle/on-life-and-death.
- ChicagoAristotle. On Life and Death. Digital reproduction, SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/aristotle/on-life-and-death.
Reference to the edition that SigPhi reproduces: SigPhi is its digital reproduction, not its publisher. The edition's year is not in the metadata (hence "n.d."), and the translator appears only when recorded.
What it is about
A very short text on what distinguishes the living from the non-living, and what happens when it ceases.
Context and history
A few pages, and often printed as part of On Breathing. Its brevity in the catalogue is not a defect of the copy: the work is that short. Part of the Parva naturalia, the eight short works that continue the De anima by applying its theory to particular phenomena of the living body. They are transmitted as a group and read best together.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
All the veins pulse, and do so simultaneously with each other, owing to their connexion with the heart. The heart always beats, and hence they also beat continuously and simultaneously with each other and with it. Palpitation, then, is the recoil of the heart against the compression due to cold; and pulsation is the volatilization of the heated fluid. Part 27 Respiration takes place when the hot substance which is the seat of the nutritive principle increases. For it, like the rest of the body, requires nutrition, and more so than the members, for it is through it that they are nourished. But when it increases it necessarily causes the organ to rise. This organ we must to be constructed like the bellows in a smithy, for both heart and lungs conform pretty well to this shape. Such a structure must be double, for the nutritive principle must be situated in the centre of the natural force. Thus on increase of bulk expansion results, which necessarily causes the surrounding parts to rise. Now this can be seen to occur when people respire; they raise their chest because the motive principle of the organ described resident within the chest causes an identical expansion of this organ. When it dilates the outer air must rush in as into a bellows, and, being cold, by its chilling influence reduces by extinction the excess of the fire. But, as the increase of bulk causes the organ to dilate, so diminution causes contraction, and when it collapses the air which entered must pass out again. When it enters the air is cold, but on issuing it is warm owing to its contact with the heat resident in this organ, and this is specially the case in those animals that possess a full-blooded lung. The numerous canal-like ducts in the lung, into which it passes, have each a blood-vessel lying alongside, so that the whole lung is thought to be full of blood.…