Aristotle: Soul
Edited by Caleb Cohoe (Metropolitan State University of Denver)
About this topic
Summary | One of the most disputed recent questions on this area concerns how Aristotle's conception of the soul relates to contemporary philosophy of mind. Is Aristotle a precursor of functionalism and a committed naturalist? Does his conception of soul rest on his antiquated and indefensible physics? Is Aristotle, instead, a sort of dualist? Is his position only fully articulable in terms of his own metaphysics of potentiality and actuality, matter and form? Another area of discussion has been whether Aristotle's understanding of soul and body fits with his general account of form and matter, given that the matter of the living thing, the body, does not seem able to persist in the way that the matter of other hylomorphic compounds persists. A related debate concerns whether we should think that the soul is the form of "an organic body" because the bodies of living things have parts that serve as tools or instruments or because the body as a whole is an instrument of the soul. Further important areas of research in this category include how Aristotle's general account of the soul relates to his specific accounts of soul and whether Aristotle thinks that any kind of soul could be separable from its body. |
Key works | Here I provide references to some of the debates mentioned above: A number of authors have interpreted Aristotle as, in some sense, a precursor of functionalism (e.g. Barnes 1972, Nussbaum & Putnam 1992) and as a committed naturalist (e.g. Frede 1992). Burnyeat has argued that Aristotle's conception of soul rests on his antiquated and indefensible physics (Burnyeat 1992). Aristotle has also been claimed by some as a sort of dualist (Robinson 1983). Some have drawn attention to the risk of misinterpreting Aristotle by fitting him into contemporary categories. Shields has drawn attention to such misreadings in the case of the unity of soul and body by laying out the importance of Aristotle's own account of form and matter for understanding his position on body-soul unity (Shields 2007). Ackrill (Ackrill 1973) introduced the problem of the sense in which body counts as matter to the contemporary discussion and it is often referred to as Ackrill's problem. Whiting provides an influential response (Whiting 1992). Menn defends the idea that the the body as a whole is an instrument of the soul (Menn 2002). Bolton discusses Aristotle's definitions of soul and how they relate (Bolton 1978). |
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Related categories
Siblings:
- Aristotle: Perception (342)
- Aristotle: Active/Passive Intellect (304)
- Aristotle: Philosophy of Mind, Misc (115)
- Aristotle: Criticism of Plato (17)
- Aristotle: Metaphysics (1,320 | 642)
- Plato (19,945 | 1,642)
- Alexander of Aphrodisias (90)
- Pythagoreans (435)
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