ABSTRACT
It seems not too much exaggerated to consider the Renaissance the heyday of Aristotelian psychology. Judging by the number of editions and translations produced in the eenth and sixteenth centuries, and by the amount of surviving commentaries from that period, the De anima was considered to be one of the most important works within the corpus aristotelicum.1 Renaissance commentators, compared to their medieval predecessors, paid relatively much attention to methodological issues related to the science of the soul. One of the most prominent methodological questions in their writings concerned the nature and place of the scientia de anima: what kind of discipline is the science of the soul and to which part of philosophy does it belong, to natural philosophy or to metaphysics?2 In this chapter, I shall examine the answers given to this question
* Earlier versions of this chapter were presented to audiences in Lille and Leuven, and beneted from numerous comments and criticisms. I am particularly grateful to Sander de Boer, Cees Leijenhorst, and Christoph Lüthy for their valuable comments.ewriting of this chapter was made possible through nancial support from the Netherlands Organization for Scientic Research (nwo), grant nr. --.
