| Phi 109-01 Fall 2015 |
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Aristotle’s book whose Greek title translates as On the Soul is commonly referred to as De Anima, which is the Latin translation of its title. These selections from it address three overlapping topics. Aristotle’s general characterization of the soul and distinctions among kinds of souls are found in the first group, the next group come from his discussion of sensation, and the final selections include key passages from his discussion of thought.
• In the first group (from De Anima ii 1-4), Aristotle quickly offers his definition of ‘soul’ (see the beginning of the last paragraph of the first page of the handout) and then goes on to comment on it. Be sure to note his discussion of the variety of souls and especially his references to plants. You will need to adjust your understanding of the term ‘soul’ to follow him, and one test of your understanding of what Aristotle means by ‘soul’ (or psyche in Greek) is whether it seems natural for him to say that plants have “souls” and that nutrition is the exercise of a “psychic” power. (That is, he is not making weird claims here, just saying something ordinary using a concept broader than what we usually understand by ‘soul’.)
• The second group of selections (from De Anima ii 8, 12) are focused on Aristotle’s discussion of sound and hearing. I’ve chosen these because it is here that Aristotle is closest to our own views. Although he never speaks of sound waves and comparisons to waves in water began to appear only later in antiquity, what he says about sound is consistent such a view of it. The idea of a wave is also a good route into Aristotle’s idea of “sensible forms,” which both derive from an idea of “form” in the sense of shape and constitute a sort of activity. Notice that, for him, all senses take on and share forms with the objects they sense (just as, for us, structures in the ear vibrate in response to vibrations in the object making the sound).
• Aristotle’s conception of thought, the topic of third group of selections (from De Anima iii 4, 5, 8), is parallel to his conception of sensation: the mind takes on the forms of the “thinkable” things that it knows. The comparison is made explicitly in the selections from iii 4 and iii 8.
In between is iii 5, which is a very short chapter (I’ve included all of it) and notoriously difficult to interpret. I’ve included it because, depending on how it is interpreted, it may be a place where Aristotle comes close to the view in Plato’s Phaedo. Part of the difficulty in judging whether he does is knowing whether what Aristotle speaks of as “mind” in the “active” sense, what is sometimes referred to as the “active intellect,” is an aspect of an individual soul or tied to his conception of God. Even if he does come close to Plato here, the selection from iii 8 shows that there are still substantial differences between them.