42 - Soul Power: Aristotle's De Anima

I'm amazed this is the first comment on this episode! It's been up for quite a while.

Anyway, good questions! I'll take the second one first since it's easier. Plato (in the Phadrus and Laws) had argued that soul is a self-moving thing, and Aristotle basically agrees with that although with qualifications, since the soul is in a sense moved by the thing that it wants (e.g. the food towards which it moves the body). One difference between living and non-living things, if not the difference, is that living things are capable of self-motion.

The first question is harder. Some people take a more reductive view of Aristotle's theory: the soul is just a collection of powers or faculties. This can be supported by passages in Aristotle, like when he says that sight is like the soul of the eye. And then you're right, this implies that soul can't exist independently. I would say this is Aristotle's view.

However other interpreters, especially in later antiquity and the medieval period, thought that Aristotle made an exception at least for intellection, since intellect has no bodily organ. This might be taken to imply that the soul can go on living without the body, but all it would ever be able to do is think (it never needed the body to do this in the first place).

Hi,

If you want a single text that makes clear that our knowledge depends on perception the best place is actually not in de Anima, but the last chapter of the Posterior Analytics (2.19). The question of how that text and the empirical basis of knowledge relates to the theory of intellect in De Anima is a much debated one - if you listen to later episodes you'll hear that there is a lot of disagreement about this already in late antiquity and the middle ages.

Peter

Thanks for joining the audience! 42 episodes in a week, that's pretty good going (I eventually stopped saying "I know what you're thinking" entirely because people said it was getting annoying).

Anyway, in the Aristotelian tradition the three types of soul stay constant, just because empirically these are the three types of living things. The exception might be things like angels or the idea that the whole universe has a soul, as proposed by Plato in the Timaeus.

Aristotle would say that the human soul is unchanging in type: all species are eternal and do not evolve, a human soul has the potential it has by nature, and the nature won't change. Besides there is no room for improvement anyway: it is already possible for a human soul to achieve both practical and intellectual virtue and that is full happiness, with nothing left to be desired at least within the bounds of human nature - God is better than we are, he thinks, but we cannot become gods.