Aristotle: On the Soul

In this work I propose a theory of evolution as a process of unfolding. This theory is based on four logically concatenated principles. The principle of evolutionary order establishes that the more complex cannot be generated from the simpler. The principle of origin establishes that there must be a maximum complexity that originates the others by logical deduction. Finally, the principle of unfolding and the principle of actualization guarantee the development of the evolutionary process from the simplest to the most (...) complex. These logical principles determine the existence of a virtual ideological matrix that contains the sequence of the preformed and folded morphogenetic fields. In this manner, the evolutionary process consists of the sequential unfolding and actualization of these fields, which is motorized by a process of teleologization carried out by the opening consciousness of the forms included in the fields of the ideological matrix. This theory leads to a radical change of perspective regarding the materialist worldview, and places life at the center of the evolutionary process as an activity carried out by a consciousness that seeks to fulfill a purpose by actualizing its own potentialities. (shrink)

The Middle Included is a systematic exploration of the meanings of logos throughout Aristotle’s work. It claims that the basic meaning is “gathering,” a relation that holds its terms together without isolating them or collapsing one to the other. This meaning also applies to logos in the sense of human language. Aristotle describes how some animals are capable of understanding non-firsthand experience without being able to relay it, while others relay it without understanding. Aygün argues that what distinguishes human language, (...) for Aristotle, is its ability to both understand and relay firsthand and non-firsthand experiences. This ability is key to understanding the human condition: science, history, news media, propaganda, gossip, utopian fiction, and sophistry, as well as philosophy. Ömer Aygün finds Aristotle’s name for this peculiar but crucial human ability of “gathering” both experiences is logos, and this leads to a claim about the specificity of human rationality and language. (shrink)

Aristotle outlines two methods in De Anima that one can employ when one investigates the soul. The first focuses on the exercises of a living organism’s vital capacities and the proper objects upon which these activities are directed. The second focuses on a living organism’s nature, its internal principle of movement and rest, and the single end for the sake of which this principle is exercised. I argue that these two methods yield importantly different, and prima facie incompatible, views about (...) what souls are. According to the first, the soul is a set of independently specifiable capacities that are related to one another in a manner that effects a unity of soul over and above the multiplicity. According to the second, the soul is a single, unitary nature that has a living organism’s form as its end. I bring the differences between these two conceptions of soul into relief and then attempt to reconcile the opposing views in a way privileges the conception according to which the soul is a unitary nature. In doing so, I discuss the following interrelated topics: (a) what makes a capacity a part of soul, (b) the relationship between the parts of soul within a given organism, (c) how a soul can be a unity while comprising various parts, (d) whether it is possible to give an adequate definition of life or soul, (e) what unity obtains among the various ways life is said that would allow for a proper, scientific investigation of life, and (f) the principle that grounds the hierarchy of souls—the nutritive, the perceptual, and the rational. (shrink)

My topic is the fundamental Aristotelian division between the animate and the inanimate. In particular, I discuss the transformation that occurs when an inanimate body comes to be ensouled. When nutriment is transformed into flesh it is first changed into blood. I argue that blood is unique in being, at one and the same time, both animate and inanimate; it is inanimate nutriment in actuality (or in activity) and animate flesh in potentiality (or in capacity). I provide a detailed exposition (...) of these manners of being (covering individual substances, artifacts, and mixtures), apply these insights to the case of blood, and then argue that blood's curious status is central to understanding hylomorphism in living organisms. (shrink)

In the ongoing ‘brain death’ controversy, there has been a constant push for the use of the ‘higher brain’ formulation as the criterion for the determination of death on the grounds that brain-dead individuals are no longer human beings because of their irreversible loss of consciousness and mental functions. This essay demonstrates that such a position flows from a Lockean view of human persons. Compared to the ‘consciousness-related definition of death,’ the substance view is superior, especially because it provides a (...) holistic vision of the human person, and coheres with the perennial axiom about the ‘whole and parts.’. (shrink)

The purpose of the paper is to discuss Aristotle’s account of homonymy. The major thesis advocated here is that Aristotle considers both entities and words to be homonymous, depending on the object of his criticism. Thus, when he takes issue with Plato, he tends to view homonymy more ontologically, upon which it is entities that become homonymous. When, on the other hand, he gainsays the exegetes or the sophists, he is inclined to perceive homonymy more semantically, upon which it is (...) words that become homonymous. Subsequently, this article shows that Aristotle values homonymy negatively in dialectical discussions, but positively in rhetorical and poetic arts. Finally, the present paper demonstrates that Aristotle regards systematic homonymy as a very useful theoretical tool that makes it possible to critically examine the basic terminological assumptions of any philosophical inquiry. (shrink)

The soul is an explanatory principle of Aristotle’s natural science, accounting both for the fact that living things are alive as well as for the diverse natural attributes that belong to them by virtue of being alive. I argue that the explanatory role of the soul in Aristotle’s natural science must be understood in light of his view, stated in a controversial passage from Parts of Animals (645b14–20), that the soul of a living thing is a “complex activity” of its (...) organic body. This paper explores the role of this “complex activity” model of soul in Aristotle’s study of soul in De Anima. I argue, first, that the model has its origins in De Anima II.4, where Aristotle argues that living things do all they do by nature for the sake of a single, teleologically primary end. I argue further that Aristotle uses this model to account for the psychological attributes naturally present in living things, including their capacities for vital activities like nutrition, reproduction, and perception, and that this is the task to which Aristotle devotes the obscure final chapters of De Anima III. (shrink)

I argue that a common interpretation of DA 3.4, which sees Aristotle as there rejecting Anaxagoras’s account of mind, is mistaken. Instead, I claim that, in providing his solution to the main puzzles of this chapter, Aristotle takes special care to preserve the essential features that he thinks Anaxagoras ascribes to mind, namely, its ability to know all things, its being unmixed, and its inability to be affected by mixed objects.

Translation of passages of Aristotle's De Anima into Portuguese. The passages are these: I.1, I.4 (the 'Rylean passage'); II.1-6; III.1-8. The translation is preliminary.

A discussion of De anima 3.3 designed to show that phantasia serves to prevent a dualism of different objects for perception and thought, and ensures that attention is directed to real objects in the world, for both animals and humans. when they perceive and when they think about things in their absence. There is a continuity between animal and human behaviour, based on the common use of perceptual attention as the basis of mental attention. The objects of thought are not (...) any more propositional or conceptual than the things that both humans and animals encounter and engage with in normal behaviour. (shrink)

Aristotle's theory of intellect is notoriously difficult, due basically to the scarcity of textual evidence. It has therefore always been controversial and often subject to the systematic biases of its interpretators. In order to provide a fresh and objective perspective on the text itself this book offers a detailed study of the fundamental text, Aristotle's De anima III 4-5, by giving an improved Greek text, extensive commentary, and discussion. An examination of several other important Aristotelian passages on the intellect is (...) also included. The analysis shows that Aristotle distinguishes clearly between the active and the passive intellect, but that the active intellect is not actively involved in cognitive processes, such as abstraction, but the pure principle of actuality in the soul. On this basis ancient and medieval commentators identified the human and divine intellects. (shrink)

In Mortal Imitations of Divine Life, Diamond offers an interpretation of De Anima, which explains how and why Aristotle places souls in a hierarchy of value. Aristotle’s central intention in De Anima is to discover the nature and essence of soul—the prin­ciple of living beings. He does so by identifying the common structures underlying every living activity, whether it be eating, perceiving, thinking, or moving through space. As Diamond demonstrates through close readings of De Anima, the nature of the soul (...) is most clearly seen in its divine life, while the embodied soul’s other activi­ties are progressively clearer approximations of this principle. This interpretation shows how Aristotle’s psychology and biology cannot be properly understood apart from his theological conception of God as life, and offers a new explanation of De Anima’s unity of purpose and structure. (shrink)

: In Parts of Animals II.10, 655b37-656a8, Aristotle tacitly identifies a group of animals which partake of “ living only”. This paper is an attempt to understand the nature of this group. It is argued that it is possible to make sense of this designation if we consider that some animals, which are solely endowed with the contact senses, do nothing more than mere immediate nutrition by their perceptive nature and have no other action. It is concluded that some of (...) Aristotle ’s merely living animals would be certain kinds of sponge, certain sea anemones and the ascidians among testacea. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Leibniz' (L.) concept of entelechy, though L. himself believes to have derived it directly from Aristotle, does not correspond exactly to the Aristotelian concept. The main difference between the Aristotelian and the Leibnizian concept may be explained as follows: Whereas Aristotle uses "entelecheia" to designate a property possessed by living organisms, L. takes it to be a generic term for souls and other monads. It is further argued that Aristotle's somewhat intricate argument in De (...) Anima II 1 has contributed to the misunderstanding of the Aristotelian term, a misunderstanding starting already with the Aristotelian commentators Themistius, Philoponus and Simplicius. L. took his concept from the tradition of the commentators which he knew through the Italian humanist Ermolao Barbaro. (shrink)

Aristotle’s treatment of tactility is at odds with the hierarchical order of psyche’s faculties. Touching is the commonest and lowest power; it is possessed by all sentient beings; thinking is, on the contrary, the highest faculty that distinguishes human beings. Yet, while Aristotle maintains against some of his predecessors that to think is not to sense, he nevertheless posits a causal link between practical intelligence and tactility and even describes noetic activity as a certain kind of touch. This essay elucidates (...) Aristotle’s analysis of the sense of touch in De anima and argues that tactility provides a paradigm for sensitivity in general and in particular for the reflexivity of sensation whereby the senses disclose not only what they are sensing but also that they are sensing. This feature, it is argued, has epistemological and ontological consequences. The sense of touch testifies to the physical presence of material beings and provides an empirical verification of substance’s essential feature, namely, self-reference. (shrink)

Please note, this is the original Greek text.

Hicks' edition of the De Anima contains valuable commentary from Hicks as well as useful summaries of the views of earlier commentators.

This collection consists of a two-part Introduction by the editors Martha Nussbaum and Amelie O. Rorty ; nineteen articles, mostly published here for the first time, by M. F. Burnyeat, Nussbaum and Hilary Putnam, S. Marc Cohen, Jennifer Whiting, Michael Frede, K. V. Wilkes, Alan Code and Julius Moravcsik, G. E. R. Lloyd, Charlotte Witt, Gareth B. Matthews, Richard Sorabji, Cynthia Freeland, Malcolm Schofield, Dorothea Frede, Julia Annas, Franz Brentano, L. A. Kosman, Charles Kahn, and Henry S. Richardson ; an (...) extremely useful Bibliography of works cited in these twenty chapters with important additions; an Index Locorum; and a Name Index. (shrink)

The physicist defines anger in terms of heart, blood, and heat; the dialectician says it is the desire to inflict pain in retaliation. Both give fairly sure signs for its recognition; but neither can show why these signs must go together and in what they can cohere. Aristotelian physics is presumably a way to avoid such a split, and whatever defects his account of perception or intellection suffers from cannot be traced to it. Phantasia, however, seems to be dialectically distinguished (...) from other faculties of soul and physically defined as a kind of motion; and even if Aristotle could say at what speed it moves, we do not discern in such a definition the ground for its being the link between perception and intellection. The soul is the source of both motion and awareness; and since it cannot be the efficient cause of motion without destroying the possibility of awareness, something in its cognitive capacity must be able to translate the nonmotivating acts of perception or of intellection into causes of motion. That something seems to be again phantasia, which thus comes to light as the soul’s double bond, linking the aesthetic with the noetic and awareness with motion. Phantasia is as inseparable from desire as it is from thought. It is the closest Aristotle comes to acknowledging that self-moving motion is soul. (shrink)