




































[Expositions 5.2 (2011) 38-44]  Expositions (online) ISSN: 1747-5376 

 

Interview: Mark Shiffman, Villanova University 

JOHN-PAUL SPIRO 

Villanova University 

 

Aristotle’s De Anima (On the Soul) is a forbidding work. Unlike the Nicomachean Ethics, which 

is popular in undergraduate philosophy courses and even with general readers, the De Anima is 

a formidable work of metaphysical biology that relies on extensive knowledge of the Aristotelian 

corpus. But our frustration with the text is also fruitful, as Aristotle forces us to think in ways to 

which we are not accustomed. The recent (2009) edition of De Anima published by Focus Press 

and translated by Mark Shiffman, Associate Professor of Humanities and Augustinian Traditions 

at Villanova University, preserves the text’s complexity while making it available for the curious 

(and diligent) reader. I interviewed Prof. Shiffman in October 2011. Below is a transcript of our 

conversation.   

 

 

Spiro: What are the unique challenges to translating and understanding the De Anima?  

Shiffman: The hardest thing specifically about De Anima is that in a way it’s the least 

independent text of Aristotle’s. It’s at the juncture of physics and biology and metaphysics and 

the psychological dimension of ethics. So with his other texts, there’s a sense in which they can 

stand on their own as starting points. But with De Anima you have to start out with some 

understanding at least of the Physics and of the language in which he discusses things in the 

Physics. So for the kind of translation that I want to do, it’s much more challenging if you’re not 

committing yourself to translating the whole corpus – which I have no intention of doing! I don’t 

think you can improve much on Joe Sachs’ [translations of] Physics
1
 or Metaphysics

2
. 

Spiro: What was your process of translation? How long did this take? 

Shiffman: Basically, I tried to spend some time with one sentence at a time and make sure I’ve 

thought about the different possible meanings of all the words and the different ways of 

construing all the grammar, and then spend some time letting the whole thing sink in. Then I 

tried – once I had a sense of what the sentence means or what several things it could mean – then 

I tried to come out with something in English that captures as much of that as I can. So one of the 

things that I tried to make room for was the ambiguities that are present in much of the text.  

Spiro: How long did it take? 

Shiffman: From the time that I agreed to do the translation to when I finished, it was something 

like ten years. Partly what I did in the meantime was write a dissertation that was largely about 



39  Spiro 
 

 

Aristotle, so I got a deeper understanding of Aristotle’s thought in general. And then really I did 

the bulk of the translation in about two years. For the last year or so, it meant getting up at four 

in the morning and taking a few hours to translate a paragraph. 

Spiro: I’ve noticed that too – Aristotle makes more sense in the early morning. 

Shiffman: You allow your mind to adapt itself to the Greek first thing in the morning so there’s 

no clutter yet! It is very much a contemplative process, especially with Aristotle. That’s what 

characterizes his writing style in distinction from just about anyone else: it’s the contemplative 

intensity of his way of putting things. 

Spiro: Reading your translation, I found myself going back to “On the Movement of Animals” 

and “On the Parts of Animals.” 

Shiffman: Sachs has “Memory and Recollection” in his appendix. You could have a translation 

of De Anima with about eight other works as appendices! In my original proposal I had wanted 

to do big chunks of “On the Parts of Animals” and a little of “On the Generation of Animals,” 

but the De Anima turned out to be plenty of work. 

Spiro: Your translation has a Heideggerian feel. You translate energeia as “being-at-work” and 

entelechia as “being-fully-itself.” 

Shiffman: Well, Joe Sachs was a big inspiration to me. I’m a big fan of his translations. And I 

agreed to do this translation before he had done one.  

Spiro: Is this Aristotle-via-Heidegger? 

Shiffman: I don’t think so. I think Heidegger’s attempt to dig back into the thought that Greek 

philosophers are trying to express is extremely valuable, especially for a translator. If what you 

want to do is try to bring the thinker intellectually back to life in a way that’s as immediately 

engaging with the things that they’re thinking about, as well as you can possibly manage, then I 

think you have to confront the challenge that Heidegger is so good at showing: what’s present in 

recovering an understanding of the Greek that you can’t just get from a lexicon.  

I suppose it would be fair to say, more generally, that my translation and my sense of the 

translator’s task are very much influenced by phenomenology. So not only by Heidegger, but 

partly by Husserl and partly by students of theirs.  

Spiro: You cite Hans Jonas favorably in your introduction. 

Shiffman: In my dissertation, one of the things I was dealing with was the legacy of Gadamer, 

Strauss, and Klein as influenced by Heidegger in the hermeneutics of ancient philosophy. They 

were all engaging critically with the way that he read – especially – Plato. In that earlier work of 

mine I was extending by analogy their criticism of Heidegger’s interpretation of Plato into the 

reading the Aristotle. In one way there’s a very deep influence of Heidegger, but it’s not a 



Interview: Mark Shiffman  40 

 

 

“Heideggerian reading” or through the lens of Heidegger per se. Rather I was taking Heidegger 

seriously but in a critical dialogue with his interpretations. 

The translation of energeia is something I shamelessly stole from Sachs! But I wasn’t entirely 

satisfied with his translation of entelechia so I worked out something that was more literal and 

etymologically correct, and less forcefully interpretive. Even though I don’t much disagree with 

his interpretation of what it means. 

Spiro: You read Aristotle’s account of the human soul such that we are made to be 

contemplative, as if in order to be (fully) human one must wonder about what it means to be 

human. This also recalls Heidegger’s notion of dasein, and it’s central to the question of 

Aristotle’s relationship to Plato. 

Shiffman: Possibly in comparison to Plato, Aristotle thinks we’re more contemplative than we 

know. That is, as I was saying before, already in apprehending anything we have some purchase 

on the intelligible content of it, even if only implicitly. Intellect is what distinguishes us from 

other animals, and Aristotle does have a sense – a stronger sense than you find in Plato – of the 

way in which natural beings are oriented toward the fulfillment of their powers. In that sense we 

are implicitly always contemplative beings and always on the way to achieving that nature. But, 

again, to really carry that through requires learning to contemplate. And a lot of attention is 

given, in chapters four and five of Book Three, to the intellect per se: the receptive intellect, the 

active intellect. What struck me in working through the translation – and especially it struck me 

because it was a very difficult part to translate – was the discussion of analogy that follows those 

chapters. I think that’s where Aristotle is really trying to show very palpably what this 

intellectual capacity is. Because in recognizing an analogy between things, we’re recognizing 

something that’s purely intelligible. It’s not in either of the things, but requires recognizing 

something important about them. But what we apprehend is not strictly… what we apprehend is 

the relation, and the relation is nowhere other than in intelligibility. Unless, of course, one of the 

places where that recognition takes us deeper into understanding the structure of being, is 

precisely in the analogies in the parts of animals and parts of living things more generally, 

something responsible for them having analogous parts that helps you make sense of all of them. 

So although I’m not a huge fan of IQ tests, I can see why they put a huge stress on questions of 

analogy. There’s something proper about that. 

Spiro: In your introduction, it sounds as if you think that contemporary thinking about soul – to 

the extent that there is any such thinking at all – is too influenced by Descartes. How does the De 

Anima give us an alternative? How does Aristotle challenge our assumptions? 

Shiffman: [Long pause.] It seems to me that there was not the same kind of methodologically 

explicit dualism in Aristotle’s time – not even in Plato do we find that – nonetheless the problem 

seems to exist at least implicitly for Aristotle. Certainly [Aristotle considers] the problem of how 

the earlier natural philosophers tried to deal with the question of whether we actually know 



41  Spiro 
 

 

things outside ourselves and how they tried to generally bridge that gap with materialistic 

solutions of some kind. So in De Anima, that’s one thing Aristotle is trying to come to grips with. 

That is, concerning the faculties of soul that are critical or apprehending faculties, how we can 

understand what exactly they do apprehend in the world. And what we find, or what the helpful 

alternative he provides to something like Cartesian dualism, is … I’m tempted to lean on Jonas
3
 

more than I really want to, because I’ve taught that piece and thought about it a lot in relation to 

De Anima, but that’s not really what was driving my approach to the question, which goes 

further back than that. The important thing to understand about Aristotle’s philosophical 

approach is that it’s not methodological in any modern sense. Which is to say that it’s trying to 

keep alive the problems as problems, in a way that Descartes doesn’t really seem concerned to 

do. It’s easy for Descartes to start with a kind of pure doubt that we do apprehend anything, and 

then figure out how to overcome that position, and I think he’s not very successful. That is to say 

Descartes’ solution is something that’s very much open, or something that really demands 

criticism of the kind that we find in Kant and Nietzsche. Whereas Aristotle, in keeping a number 

of problems in play and moving back and forth between them, arrives at a plausible 

understanding of how the forms that we apprehend in our senses are the sign, the indicator, of the 

form that’s the principle of being of the thing we’re apprehending. So there’s no chasm; there’s a 

continuity through which we progress by examining and thinking about things that start out as 

given to us and our senses but already implicitly have a kind of intelligible content to them that 

by Aristotle’s account is the beginning of apprehending the intelligible content of the very being 

of the thing. So as opposed to Descartes, for whom there are two fundamentally different kinds 

of being that you have to find some way of connecting, for Aristotle they’re not fundamentally 

different; but the process of establishing the union of the two is the laborious one. 

Spiro: Laborious but necessary. 

Shiffman: Laborious but necessary. And can’t be accomplished by starting from universal 

doubt, but can only be accomplished by this gradual process by which we recognize some of our 

errors and the sources of those errors that skew our interpretations of things. So there’s a kind of 

self-knowledge that the Aristotelian process demands and engenders that the Cartesian process 

simply tries to leap over. 

Spiro: There are cognitive scientists who think of consciousness not as a spirit or an illusion but 

as a process. Are they being Aristotelian? 

Shiffman: I think they’re trying. As Aristotle would say, they’re being “led on by the truth 

itself,” but there are two impediments that are really one impediment: they don’t raise 

metaphysical questions because they don’t see that those are fundamentally within their purview 

and at issue in their endeavors. Even if they do want to negate a Cartesian metaphysical 

formulation, they’re substituting another dogmatic one in its place, which is largely from 

ignorance, I think, of the possibility of a more robust, classical understanding of metaphysics. 

And, I think, the very methodological demands from which they’re beginning are already a 



Interview: Mark Shiffman  42 

 

 

compromise with Descartes (or the Cartesian spirit), which is not simply a matter of dualism but 

has to do with the question of whether you can apprehend what’s real and intelligible with 

something other than a kind of conceptual construct. So, in a sense, you could say they’re more 

Hobbesian, and the parting of ways between Descartes and Hobbes is really not so much one of 

method but of in what interests the methods are being applied. Descartes is a minimalist in the 

assumptions that he will allow himself, in the interest of clear representation of the phenomena; 

Hobbes is a methodological minimalist in the interest of the coherence of an explanatory system. 

If that’s your priority then materialism makes a lot of sense. But both of those methodological 

approaches are united in abandoning the kind of dialectical – and what you might call 

phenomenological – approach that Aristotle takes. 

Spiro: If the student of nature must consider metaphysics, does this mean contemporary 

scientists should expand the scope of their inquiry? Or is this more a matter for the curriculum: 

students should be required to study philosophy – and metaphysical philosophy – along with 

biology and physics? 

Shiffman: That’s a good question, a difficult question to address. On the one hand I want to say 

that scientists ought to have a better understanding of the ways in which their sciences open on to 

philosophical questions and are not really, can’t really be hermetically insulated from them. And 

ideally that they would be able to understand the philosophical alternatives that open up as areas. 

But on the other hand I don’t have a lot of, I think what generally passes as “philosophy of 

science” or “philosophy of biology” is typically too narrow and not always that helpful. So it 

would be great if everyone educated in science also had to be educated in the philosophy of 

several traditions and understand its bearing on the questions that they’re not asking. Otherwise 

what tends to happen is what John Henry Newman said would happen when you’re missing 

disciplines in your education, which is that other disciplines start encroaching on their territory 

and thinking they can address the questions that don’t really belong in their discipline. You can 

see this in for example the conversations surrounding Intelligent Design in America, and the 

question of whether it’s a scientific idea or a religious idea, when really it’s a philosophical idea, 

but philosophy is not a part of the cultural conversation in a way that lets people recognize that. 

Spiro: Does the De Anima help us understand, say, the Nicomachean Ethics or the Politics? 

Some people just read those two books and slight or even ignore Aristotle’s other works. Are 

they missing something?  

Shiffman: Yes. I guess partly the question is, assuming Aristotle’s metaphysics and biology are 

entirely wrong, would his practical philosophy be essentially right? I think in order to maintain 

that, you would have to explain how you can convincingly ground his thinking about the human 

person, about the household, about the tensions between household and city (and individual and 

city), without a strong understanding of the good and natural goods. The only way you really 

could do that is by treating the practical arguments as dialectical in the Aristotelian sense: that is, 

dialectical in the sense of articulating the most persuasive view of what would make a human life 



43  Spiro 
 

 

satisfying, without what I think is the stronger and on the whole valid foundation for that view in 

Aristotle’s understanding of nature. One of the places that I found this most crucial is in the 

discussion of the household and of economics in Book 1 of the Politics, where Aristotle offers 

what is really a critique of, in our terms, a critique of an economy that’s centered so nearly 

exclusively on money. I don’t find that most of the people who favor focusing exclusively on the 

practical philosophy tend to take that as seriously as I think Aristotle does, but they treat it more 

historically. Whereas I think what he’s providing there is a powerful critique of how life 

becomes deformed as “wealth” is considered more and more in terms of money, fungible wealth, 

rather than what he calls “natural forms” of wealth.  

Spiro: Who is Aristotle’s audience? Is he just speaking to Athenians or is he speaking beyond 

(or past) them? Does he identify himself and his work against or outside of Athens? 

Shiffman: I do think, and this is very much what my dissertation was about, I think that he’s 

taking the starting points of the Athenian audience – mostly an aristocratic, youngish audience – 

and gradually showing the limitations of that and moving their understanding towards something 

more true to the phenomena. And also something toward a more accurate understanding of what 

the philosophical life or philosophical engagement means as a way of life, as a spiritual 

condition. So in that way my reading is to a certain extent influenced by Pierre Hadot.
4
 However, 

I think that in the case of Aristotle, first of all Hadot’s understanding of what Aristotle’s up to is 

not very good, not quite adequate, partly because in his interpretations of the ancient schools, he 

is privileging the Stoic and Epicurean models. That doesn’t work so well for people like Plato 

and Aristotle, for whom the question of how we arrive at the truth and what sort of spiritual 

condition that itself requires is really central. 

Spiro: How is Aristotle misunderstood? 

Shiffman: There are lots of ways. To start with, some marginal observations, he’s thought not to 

have a sense of humor! And I think he does. And probably more importantly from the 

interpretive point of view, most interpreters I think don’t appreciate how the movement of his 

thought in the different writings is never a linear movement. It’s always dialectical in two senses: 

there’s the Platonic sense of dialectic, in which, among other things, in order to understand 

something you follow out different possibilities of how to account for it, and then that process 

gets you deeper into the principles that you need to recognize in order to understand it, and you 

come back on that basis and reconsider it; but also there’s the sense in which Aristotle himself 

tends to use “dialectic” which more has to do with the common opinions about things. And 

there’s a way in which Aristotle … here’s a good example: in De Anima, there’s a question that 

he spends quite a bit of time on: whether our thoughts are best understood as images, as 

imagination, as “concepts” as we would say, as constructs of our own process of trying to grasp 

things, or whether our intellect is able to pass beyond the confines of our mental apparatus to 

apprehend something intelligible in itself. And I think that interpreters want to find an answer to 

that question in De Anima, and I think Aristotle develops the question to the point at which he’s 



Interview: Mark Shiffman  44 

 

 

clarified what’s at issue as much as he possibly can, but to go any further in trying to resolve the 

question would require claiming a perspective on ourselves that we can’t have: an external 

perspective on the process of thinking, which we can’t attain. That’s one of the things that people 

often fail to appreciate, that he’s really leaving some very important problems at the point where 

the problem itself is clearest, where he doesn’t see any way of progressing further. This 

essentially, if you take that question and put it into medieval terms, turns into the 

realist/nominalist debate, and then questions persist to this day, should we understand Aristotle 

as a nominalist or a realist; and I think the answer is “no.”  

 

Notes 
 

1. Aristotle. 1995. Aristotle’s Physics: a Guided Study. Trans. Joe Sachs. New Brunswick, NJ: 

Rutgers University Press. 

2. Aristotle. 2002. Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Trans. Joe Sachs. Santa Fe: Green Lion Press. 

3. Jonas, Hans. 2001. The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology. Evanston, IL: 

Northwestern University Press. 

4. Hadot, Pierre. 1995. Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault. 

Trans. Michael Chase. New York: Wiley-Blackwell. 

 


