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Aristotle’s De Anima

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PRESENTATION OUTLINE

Aristotle’s Treatise on De Anima (On the Soul)

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If you could take a soul and put it in a coffee cup, would the coffee cup be alive? Why or why not?

Aristotle’s book On the Soul is an abstract, theoretical account of animal life.

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In thinking about Aristotle’s treatment of the soul in this work, it helps to think back to Plato’s Phaedo; having a soul means being an animal.

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why does Aristotle begin his discussion of the soul by asking what a soul is rather than by asking whether or not there is a soul?

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For in asking what the nature of the soul is, Aristotle is asking simply what the distinction is between living and non-living things;

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the soul is whatever the principle is that explains living things being alive.

It may help understand this fact to note that a common word in Greek for being alive means having a soul.

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Imagine if instead of say- ing that someone were alive or dead or had just died we said that they were “besouled” or “unsouled” or “desouled;”

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it might then be clear to us that someone asking, “What is the soul,” is asking, “What is it to be alive?”

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The characteristic activities that mark out things as alive are fundamentally two:

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1. Self-motion. Things that are alive have self-initiated motion so that they can act in the world.

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2. Perception. Living things exhibit some form of perceptual conscious- ness or awareness. They are able not merely to act in the world but to be affected by the world and be aware of that affection.

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Aristotle’s Definition of the Soul

the soul, he writes, “is the first actuality of a natural body that has life potentially in it.”

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To understand what Aristotle means, we will need to understand the notion of a first actuality.

Every human being has the ability or potentiality to speak English. But there is a difference between the potentiality that a newborn has to speak English and the potentiality of an adult English speaker.

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The adult’s ability is the “developed” potentiality of the newborn’s.

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This ability itself (as is made clear when one is silent) is distinct from the actuality of actually speaking, the activity that occurs when one is engaged in talking English.

three levels of potentiality and actuality.

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  • The potentiality of a newborn to speak English.
  • The realized ability of an adult to speak English, even if the speaker is momentarily silent.
  • The full actuality of speaking, realized in actual talk.
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What Aristotle meant by FIRST ACTUALITY?

Like the ability to speak English, it is at once the realization of a potentiality, and a potentiality for further realization.

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The soul is such a principle in which living is the analogy of speaking English.

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Roughly, the analogy looks like this:
The body is analogous to the infant’s ability to speak.
The soul is analogous to the adult’s realized ability to speak. The activity of living is analogous to the activity of actual speech.

This scheme of Body/Soul/Living is only the global version of a scheme Aristotle employs throughout his work. With it he gives a general account of the activities that distinguish living beings, the activities we might call “psychic” (from the Greek psyche, soul): the activities of life.

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One of the central capacities of animal life is the capacity for nutrition. Our ability to take in food and to make it into ourselves is analogous to the capacity for perception, our ability to perceive or take the world in and transform it, as it were, into conscious awareness.

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