Flinders University Department of Languages - Modern Greek
Abstract
On the basis of two premises to which he is committed, it would seem that Aristotle
must be a “naturalist” about the investigation of the soul:
1. Natural things have both a material and a formal nature.
2. In the case of living things, their formal nature is their soul.
This paper deals with a complication in the above inference. In De partibus animalium
I 1, Aristotle insists that the natural scientist should not speak of all soul, since not
all of the soul is a nature, though one or more parts of it is (641b8–9). In this paper I
argue that this claim is consistent with everything he says in the De anima about the
investigation of reason, and is a consequence of his views about the methodological
norms of natural science. Aristotle is a naturalist when it comes to those parts of the
soul human beings share with other animals, but his views about the mind are much
more complicated