Aristotle’S Definition of Soul And The Programme of the De Anima

Abstract

Abstract Aristotle’s De anima is a very fashionable book. It is fashionable chiefly because Aristotle develops a doctrine of the soul, as the form or ‘first actuality’ of an organic natural body, which seems to offer a via media between materialism and dualism. On Aristotle’s account, an animal’s soul is something other than its body, indeed something of a different ontological type from the body, but the soul is not independent of the body, and no problem arises of how soul and body can be united into a substantial whole: ‘there is no need to investigate whether the soul and the body are one, any more than the wax and the shape, or in general the matter of each thing and that of which it is the matter; for while “one” and “being” are said in many ways, the primary [sense] is actuality’ (De anima 2. 1, 4121, 6–9). Many twentieth-century philosophers have been looking for just such a via media between materialism and dualism, at least for the case of the human mind; and much scholarly attention has gone into asking whether Aristotle’s view can be aligned with one of the modern alternatives, or whether it offers something preferable to any of the modern alternatives, or whether it is so bound up with a falsified Aristotelian science that it must regretfully be dismissed as no longer a live option.

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