I always think of Aristotle as a biologist who wrote about many other subjects. Everywhere his student, Alexander, went he would send samples of the local plants and animals back to his teacher. One can imagine Aristotle studying a new sample, comparing it to those which he already knew.
In the Middle Ages this view of Aristotle shifted away from biology toward philosophy. He came to be viewed not just as a philosopher, but as The Philosopher. The shift is unfortunate because one can not understand his philosophy without appreciating his biological outlook. For biology is woven throughout his philosophy.
Today his place in biology has all but been forgotten. Our understanding of his philosophy has faded along with it.
Aristotle's work on the Philosophy of Biology was ***On the Soul*** (Greek Περὶ Ψυχῆς (Perì Psūchês), Latin De Anima).
"But wait," you say "what does the soul have to do with biology?"
To explain that we must look back to René Descartes. In his day, Aristotle's idea of the soul was commonplace. The soul was understood to be the soul of the body; the body, as the body of the soul. The two concepts went together like hand in glove. All animals were understood to have souls. The very word, 'animal' comes from the Latin word, 'anima' or soul. Thus the Latin title for Aristotle's work, ***De Anima.*** Even plants had some share in soul.
Descartes changed all that. He divided religion from science by dividing soul from body.
Today all the developed world follows Descartes. Animals are conceived of as nothing more than bodies. Many people will openly declare that animals are just biological robots. Many conceive of their own bodies as robotic devices. We go to doctors to maintain these robotic systems through drugs and surgery.
Personally, I reject Descartes' false dichotomy. I look back to the original unity of soul and body. My body is that collection of all the parts that belong to me: my hands and feet, my skin and bones, my hair and nails, etc. My soul is the purely natural unity of those many parts into something more than the mere sum of the parts.
Thus the soul is part of nature, not something separate from or opposed to nature.
This is actually a plausible perspective on the soul, and especially on the resolution of the problem of Cartesian interactionism. Thus, the soul is not separate from the body as to warrant the problem of how such unlkes can ever interact. Yet, it would seem that such a resolution is not all-that-plausible given the acute metaphysical and theological problems it had generated over the history of philosophical problems. First, is it plausible to resolve the personal identity problem from this perspective? Can i in all honesty and firmness conclude that i am my body without any remainder? Second, what would be the nature of God or the spiritual if the soul is not spiritual but merely "something more than the mere sum of the parts" of my body?
All these are just the usual perennial problems that such smug ansers have generated over time. Any resolution that rejects the Cartesian false dichotomy--and any attempted resolution of the problem would be right to reject--must also take the attendant philosophical dangers into consideration.
VS: "i feel it is really stupidity in trying to describe what is soul and how it interacts, as for a real logician its just another story of harry potter nothing more than that as we dont have any empherical evidence of it, do we !!??"
It is an interesting question...
The British philosopher, John Lucas has pointed out some implications of Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem regarding free will... Assume that every man, h, is deterministic. There is a logical system L(h) which predicts man's behavior in any circumstance. Suppose m is a skillful mathematician. Given L(m) then, according to Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem our mathematician, m can (in theory) construct a theorem T(L(m)) which can not be proven in L(m). The mete-mathematical consequence of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem implies that T(L(m)) is true. Thus our mathematican can (in theory) prove a theorem that can not be proven in L(m) --- something he can not do according to the supposition that L(m) predicts his behavior.
Lucas' argument is not quite a mathematical proof that man has free will. But it has generated quite a bit of discussion regarding the issue.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lucas_(philosopher)#Free_will
(Note: due to the limitations of ResearchGate's text input, my browser didn't recognize the URL above. So you may have to cut and paste the URL into your browser to get all of it.)
VS: "but bill i really wanted to convey this 'it is a different approach and way to know 'I' and mere logical thinking and reasoning can fetch you so far"
I have had some time to reformulate my thoughts... The fact that men can get around the limitations imposed by determinism --- the Turing Machine... seems to be due to man's ability to establish unity at a higher level. That unity is the key to man's freedom.
Man is a self-organizing unity. That unity is the soul.
"Holding as we do that, while knowledge of any kind is a thing to be honoured and prized, one kind of it may, either by reason of its greater exactness or of a higher dignity and greater wonderfulness in its objects, be more honourable and precious than another, on both accounts we should naturally be led to place in the front rank the study of the soul. The knowledge of the soul admittedly contributes greatly to the advance of truth in general, and, above all, to our understanding of Nature, for the soul is in some sense the principle of animal life. Our aim is to grasp and understand, first its essential nature, and secondly its properties; of these some are taught to be affections proper to the soul itself, while others are considered to attach to the animal owing to the presence within it of soul." ~Aristotle; ***On the Soul;*** Book I; #1
"To attain any assured knowledge about the soul is one of the most difficult things in the world. As the form of question which here presents itself, viz. the question 'What is it?', recurs in other fields, it might be supposed that there was some single method of inquiry applicable to all objects whose essential nature (as we are endeavouring to ascertain there is for derived properties the single method of demonstration); in that case what we should have to seek for would be this unique method. But if there is no such single and general method for solving the question of essence, our task becomes still more difficult; in the case of each different subject we shall have to determine the appropriate process of investigation. If to this there be a clear answer, e.g. that the process is demonstration or division, or some known method, difficulties and hesitations still beset us-with what facts shall we begin the inquiry? For the facts which form the starting-points in different subjects must be different, as e.g. in the case of numbers and surfaces." ~Aristotle; ***On the Soul;*** Book I; #1
VS: if soul does exists that also means that it cannot be destroyed and but only transformed
this is not my 'logic' may be a basic scientific principle of( 'no object cannot be created or destroyed in this universe but only transformed' )"
I think, Ven, that you are putting the cart before the horse. We ought to decide what sort of thing might be soul before we try to say how it may exist.
Certainly there have been many scientists who believe in a 'Steady State' universe in which matter is constantly being created. I think that theory is currently questioned, but I am sure there are those who still believe it. On the other hand, there are those who believe in the so-called 'Big Bang" in which matter was created many billions of years ago. And there may be some scientists who believe that matter is somehow eternal.
Aristotle, himself, would agree with you that matter is eternal. He clearly said that. Yet he believed in the soul. For he did not think of it, precisely as matter.
DH: "The soul under biology? Surely a spelling error, no?"
No, not a spelling error... Aristotle's book, ***On the Soul*** is all about the philosophical implications of biology. It is only since the time of René Descartes that the soul has been looked upon as anything but a part of nature.
Bill : Aristotle's view of biology was teleological. He also held to a "great chain of being". His biology is also entirely polluted by his errors in physics (he relates position on the "chain of being" to the 'elements' fire, water, earth, air and aether - I analysed the four elemental model elsewhere - I'll repost it below for what it's worth). "Place", "void", and "time" indeed - was there ever such stuff?
These errors impact both his biology and - more importantly - his metaphysics. This is not, of course, a criticism of Ari - his physics is correct by his contemporary standards, and he had no reason to doubt the validity of first philosophy.
As for soles sorry souls : The 'soul' is part of nature iff it can figure in explanations of natural phenomena; we are justified in accepting its reality iff it explains natural penomena that cannot be explained otherwise. I rather think 'soul' is an illegitimate generalisation of 'mind', but let's see whether you can convince me otherwise.
As for the classical elemental model :
We wondered whether these were "fundamental" or not, and I remarked on the pair of oppositions "wet/dry" and "hot/cold" which supposedly underlay the "elements" - the precise sequence being (according to Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Elements) :
AIR is primarily wet and secondarily hot.
FIRE is primarily hot and secondarily dry.
EARTH is primarily dry and secondarily cold.
WATER is primarily cold and secondarily wet.
If you'd look at the Wikipedia articel, I'd draw you attention to the diagrammatic representation of the “diamond” of the elements and the “square” of the oppositions. The ‘primary’ characteristic of each element is given by the quality positioned anticlockwise to the element; the secondary characteristic by the quality positioned anticlockwise.
This explains why Water should be, surprisingly PRIMARILY cold and Air should be PRIMARILY wet. Any other sequence leads either to elements being, for example, “wet and dry” or to the definition of water as “primarily wet and secondarily hot”, which is contrary to our general experience of water in nature.
So, the apparent states of things (solid, liquid, gas, “energy”) and the apparent characteristics of those states (being wet or dry; being hot or cold) are drawn from phenomenal experience; but as soon as that experience is regimented into some kind of “protomodel”, it leads to counterintuitive results.
The problem lies in the characteristics chosen. Fire evidently has the characteristic of being cold; water evidently has the characteristic of being wet. A large number of solids have the property of being dry, thus completing the opposition “wet/dry”; given that fire is *evidently* both hot and dry, this allows only the combinations “dry and cold” OR “wet and cold” OR “wet and hot” to describe the other elements.
Water is evidently not dry, so it must be either “wet and cold” or “wet and hot”. Furthermore, neither “wet and cold” nor “wet and dry” are sufficient characterisations of the phenomenal qualities of earth; therefore, it can only be cold and dry. We’re left with the choice between “wet and cold” and “wet and hot” for either Water or Air.
There is no particular reason for the choice of one or another save observation of the interactions of fire and water and of fire and air. In sufficient quantities, water douses fire, while blowing air onto a fire usually enlivens it (though it can extinguish it). Therefore, Air and Fire must “share” a characteristic; given that by elimination we have assigned the characteristic “dry” to Earth, this characteristic must be “hot”. Air communicates its heat to fire, though in the wrong proportions, the “wetness” of Air can lead to the extinction of the fire; Water is always either sublimated by a fire into Air (the “cold” becomes “hot”) or itself converts the fire into Earth, or ash (the “heat” becomes “cold”).
What’s interesting is that, even in a model based directly on our phenomenal experience and on our immediate intuitions about that experience, there’s a degree of counterintuitivity introduced by the “formal requirements” of the model; furthermore, these counterintuitive results are then “explained” by appeal to the “predicitive success” of the model... you can imagine the discourse:
“Well, yes, I know that it seems odd to say that Water is only secondarily wet, and I know that Air doesn’t usually seem particularly wet OR hot; but these characteristics explain why Water extinguishes Fire or is completely dispelled by it and also why Air can enliven Fire, so it MUST be right...”
And we talk as if “counterintuitive physics” were something new...
SC: "Didn't Moses write that God Breathed into the Nostrils of Adam and that mound of chemicals became a living Being. God was called the great Soul Atman and man as a drop of the Ocean with a small letter a
in atman. Both of these examples pre-dates Descartes. This is nothing to "lose your head" over nor any
sleep."
I do not believe that one must adopt either Mosaic or Hindu ideas to justify the concept. Aristotle was a Greek. He believed that there is a First Cause of being, but his idea was closer to what might be called Deism than any of the major religions would allow. His work, ***On the Soul*** in particular was not justified by any reference to the gods. He thought of the soul as a purely natural concept.
DH: "Bill : Aristotle's view of biology was teleological. He also held to a 'great chain of being.' His biology is also entirely polluted by his errors in physics (he relates position on the 'chain of being' to the 'elements' fire, water, earth, air and aether - I analysed the four elemental model elsewhere - I'll repost it below for what it's worth)."
Aristotle specifically rejected the idea that the soul is composed of the five elements. The weaknesses of that theory are, therefore irrelevant to the soul.
I do not think the word, 'polluted' is justified. First of all, the word seems to imply some sort of prejudice against his ideas. You really ought to express your objections clearly --- then such a term would become unnecessarily. Secondly, I see the effect working in the reverse from what you imagine. Aristotle was a biologist, first and foremost. It was his biology which influenced his physics and metaphysics, not his physics which influenced his biology and metaphysics.
You certainly may object to his ideas. I object to them, myself. But I find them interesting. I look at him, more or less the way C. S. Peirce did. For Peirce thought of Pragmatism within in the philosophical tradition going back to Aristotle.
DH: "As for soles sorry souls : The 'soul' is part of nature iff it can figure in explanations of natural phenomena; we are justified in accepting its reality iff it explains natural penomena that cannot be explained otherwise."
I do not believe Albert Einstein would necessarily agree. I think he justified Relativity in its being a simple and elegant explanation of the observed phenomena.
DH: "I rather think 'soul' is an illegitimate generalisation of 'mind', but let's see whether you can convince me otherwise."
Aristotle believed that the soul was common to all animal (and even plant) life. But he attributed the rational soul only to some of them --- men in particular. I certainly do not think he would attribute mind to plant life.
On the other hand, didn't C. S. Peirce say that matter is effete mind? And doesn't Quantum Mechanics give support to that idea? Certainly there are scientists who say it does.
VS: "i think this is becoming gaurding mr "aristotle" than any productive out put"
Please explain...
If David attacks the idea of the soul based on his rejection of Aristotle, then is it not reasonable to explain how he may be wrong?
I really am not a follower of Aristotle. I consider myself to be a Pragmatist. I find Aristotle intensely interesting. I simply believe that the soul is the simplest and most elegant way to explain the observed phenomena. I understood when I began this thread that there would be some who simply would not listen to the subject... some who would object simply because of the author of the work... others who would simply say that it contradicts their beliefs. That was to be expected.
VS: "ok let us say aristotle was the one who understood it all so
bill please do discribe what is sole opps again soul according to him his ??
and dont be judjemental about "mosaic" or hindu it is just that your lack of knowledge on this subjects !!"
I never said Aristotle understood it all. I am not judgmental regarding Mosaic or Hindu ideas. I am simply stating that my interest in the soul is in its status as a natural entity.
Whether I am knowledgeable about the subject is debatable, I suppose...
I would prefer to follow Aristotle's own way of discussing the subject. Examining his ideas will give us ample opportunities to formulate our own ideas...
"First, no doubt, it is necessary to determine in which of the summa genera soul lies, what it is; is it 'a this-somewhat, 'a substance, or is it a quale or a quantum, or some other of the remaining kinds of predicates which we have distinguished? Further, does soul belong to the class of potential existents, or is it not rather an actuality? Our answer to this question is of the greatest importance. " ~ Aristotle; ***On the Soul;*** Book I; #1
"We must consider also whether soul is divisible or is without parts, and whether it is everywhere homogeneous or not; and if not homogeneous, whether its various forms are different specifically or generically: up to the present time those who have discussed and investigated soul seem to have confined themselves to the human soul. We must be careful not to ignore the question whether soul can be defined in a single unambiguous formula, as is the case with animal, or whether we must not give a separate formula for each of it, as we do for horse, dog, man, god (in the latter case the 'universal' animal-and so too every other 'common predicate'-being treated either as nothing at all or as a later product). Further, if what exists is not a plurality of souls, but a plurality of parts of one soul, which ought we to investigate first, the whole soul or its parts? (It is also a difficult problem to decide which of these parts are in nature distinct from one another.) Again, which ought we to investigate first, these parts or their functions, mind or thinking, the faculty or the act of sensation, and so on? If the investigation of the functions precedes that of the parts, the further question suggests itself: ought we not before either to consider the correlative objects, e.g. of sense or thought? It seems not only useful for the discovery of the causes of the derived properties of substances to be acquainted with the essential nature of those substances (as in mathematics it is useful for the understanding of the property of the equality of the interior angles of a triangle to two right angles to know the essential nature of the straight and the curved or of the line and the plane) but also conversely, for the knowledge of the essential nature of a substance is largely promoted by an acquaintance with its properties: for, when we are able to give an account conformable to experience of all or most of the properties of a substance, we shall be in the most favourable position to say something worth saying about the essential nature of that subject; in all demonstration a definition of the essence is required as a starting-point, so that definitions which do not enable us to discover the derived properties, or which fail to facilitate even a conjecture about them, must obviously, one and all, be dialectical and futile." ~Aristotle; ***On the Soul;*** Book I; #1
"A further problem presented by the affections of soul is this: are they all affections of the complex of body and soul, or is there any one among them peculiar to the soul by itself? To determine this is indispensable but difficult. If we consider the majority of them, there seems to be no case in which the soul can act or be acted upon without involving the body; e.g. anger, courage, appetite, and sensation generally. Thinking seems the most probable exception; but if this too proves to be a form of imagination or to be impossible without imagination, it too requires a body as a condition of its existence. If there is any way of acting or being acted upon proper to soul, soul will be capable of separate existence; if there is none, its separate existence is impossible. In the latter case, it will be like what is straight, which has many properties arising from the straightness in it, e.g. that of touching a bronze sphere at a point, though straightness divorced from the other constituents of the straight thing cannot touch it in this way; it cannot be so divorced at all, since it is always found in a body. It therefore seems that all the affections of soul involve a body-passion, gentleness, fear, pity, courage, joy, loving, and hating; in all these there is a concurrent affection of the body. In support of this we may point to the fact that, while sometimes on the occasion of violent and striking occurrences there is no excitement or fear felt, on others faint and feeble stimulations produce these emotions, viz. when the body is already in a state of tension resembling its condition when we are angry. Here is a still clearer case: in the absence of any external cause of terror we find ourselves experiencing the feelings of a man in terror. From all this it is obvious that the affections of soul are enmattered formulable essences."
~Aristotle; ***On the Soul;*** Book I; #1
VS: "ok ok still i didnt get what was soul acording to mr aristotles ???
still i feel here also it seems to me soul=mind how do differentiate this things ??"
Since I disagree slightly from what Aristotle believed, I would prefer to let him speak in his own words. But give him time. Rome was not built in a day --- nor are Aristotle's thoughts to be digested so easily.
What he has proposed in the passage you quoted is his recognition that the body is an important aspect of mind. Thus it is hard to imagine a condition in which the soul is in turmoil but the body perfectly at rest... or conversely, a state in which the body is in turmoil but the soul perfectly at rest.
As to differentiating the soul from the mind... I believe that the mind is an activity of animals, much like eating or sleeping. We are sensitive beings. We perceive the world through the senses. We move about the world using our muscles. The mind is the coordinating activity within us, drawing information from the senses and directing our muscles. It is --- more or less --- an abstraction drawn from our power to think.
The soul, on the other hand, is the very animal life within us. It unifies the many parts of our being into one composite whole. Think about it... are you an arm or a leg, an eye or an ear? Or are you a man composed of many parts? What is your essence? What defines you as an animal of a specific type? What makes you like other men? What makes you unique?
dear bill, do you accept essentialism? and if so, do you accept evolution? i would've thought that evolution would do away with essentialism, so the answer to the last bunch of questions would certainly not be 'the soul as essence'. anyway. this animal life thing reminds me of vitalism. do you espouse vitalism?
HS: "dear bill, do you accept essentialism? and if so, do you accept evolution? i would've thought that evolution would do away with essentialism, so the answer to the last bunch of questions would certainly not be 'the soul as essence.'
I take a rather pragmatic approach to essence. I have never heard of a cow suddenly becoming a water buffalo or of a cat suddenly becoming a dog. I have never heard of a lion suddenly becoming a tiger or of a mouse suddenly becoming a hamster. I have never heard of a fish suddenly becoming a snake or of a horse suddenly becoming a Z-bra.
But I have known a cat suddenly to lose a leg. It was our cat. We had gone out of town for a weekend, leaving the cat with a neighbor. When we returned home the neighbor told us that the cat had escaped. The next morning we found the cat. One of its rear legs had been injured --- presumably by a car. We took the cat to a vet who amputated the leg.
The cat --- I will still call it a cat, though minus a part of what a cat normally possesses --- much to our amazement hardly seemed to notice the loss. There was a small fence, perhaps three feet high... the cat would still jump up and walk along a rail no more than in inch wide...
So in my humble opinion, there was something remaining in the cat which made it into a cat --- not a dog or any other sort of animal.
HS: "this animal life thing reminds me of vitalism. do you espouse vitalism?"
I suppose that depends on what you mean by vitalism. I reject the reductionist mechanism so much a part of the current scientific culture. There is simply no logical justification for it... It is hard to avoid taking a more holistic view, given the problems arising from Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem --- as the British philosopher, J. R. Lucas has shown...
http://www.leaderu.com/truth/2truth08.html
"Consequently their definitions ought to correspond, e.g. anger should be defined as a certain mode of movement of such and such a body (or part or faculty of a body) by this or that cause and for this or that end. That is precisely why the study of the soul must fall within the science of Nature, at least so far as in its affections it manifests this double character. Hence a physicist would define an affection of soul differently from a dialectician; the latter would define e.g. anger as the appetite for returning pain for pain, or something like that, while the former would define it as a boiling of the blood or warm substance surround the heart. The latter assigns the material conditions, the former the form or formulable essence; for what he states is the formulable essence of the fact, though for its actual existence there must be embodiment of it in a material such as is described by the other. Thus the essence of a house is assigned in such a formula as 'a shelter against destruction by wind, rain, and heat'; the physicist would describe it as 'stones, bricks, and timbers'; but there is a third possible description which would say that it was that form in that material with that purpose or end. Which, then, among these is entitled to be regarded as the genuine physicist? The one who confines himself to the material, or the one who restricts himself to the formulable essence alone? Is it not rather the one who combines both in a single formula? If this is so, how are we to characterize the other two? Must we not say that there is no type of thinker who concerns himself with those qualities or attributes of the material which are in fact inseparable from the material, and without attempting even in thought to separate them? The physicist is he who concerns himself with all the properties active and passive of bodies or materials thus or thus defined; attributes not considered as being of this character he leaves to others, in certain cases it may be to a specialist, e.g. a carpenter or a physician, in others (a) where they are inseparable in fact, but are separable from any particular kind of body by an effort of abstraction, to the mathematician, (b) where they are separate both in fact and in thought from body altogether, to the First Philosopher or metaphysician. But we must return from this digression, and repeat that the affections of soul are inseparable from the material substratum of animal life, to which we have seen that such affections, e.g. passion and fear, attach, and have not the same mode of being as a line or a plane."
~ Aristotle; ***On the Soul;*** Book I; #1
dear bill, do you believe that animals have essences and that these animal essences do not change over time? here are some arguments (i hope) against it: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/species/#DeaEss
by vitalism i mean a special force apart from the usual ones studied in physics, that demarcates living beings from non-living beings. can you tell us a bit more, in your own words about this 'very animal life' within us?
or do you simply adopt the aristotelian framework wholesale, so that we start a discussion on Aristotle's philosophy of biology? because it seems to me, though i'm most probably wrong, that you adopt certain parts of Aristotle without adopting the whole, which makes everything make sense.
well, there are some things in aristotle that only make sense when viewed wholesale. for example his discussion of the soul only makes sense when one considers the five souls of the living beings. the fivefold distinction i think could be modernised, though an attempt to talk only of 'the soul' without consideration of how Aristotle intends this soul concept to be used (which may be a different way from the christian or hindu soul) would be an injustice to aristotle. what do you think?
I see myself as a pragmatist. But I do like some ideas of Aristotle --- though I greatly dislike Aristotle in general.
As to vitalism, I do not specifically believe that there is a 'special force' (such as ***qi***) involved. There is sufficient 'wiggle room' within Quantum Mechanics to allow for life all without such forces. On the other hand, I do not specifically deny that there may be forces (such as ***qi***) which physics does not know about.
Perhaps it should be pointed out that Aristotle didn't believe in a 'special force' responsible for life. He believed in the five elements --- earth, water, fire, air and the quintessence or heavenly element. He had a theory about the affections (forces) governing the earthly four elements which does not include any specific life force. He believed in four causes: efficient, material, formal and final --- but no specific cause of life.
He understood the soul as a formal cause. He understood the body as a material cause.
"For our study of soul it is necessary, while formulating the problems of which in our further advance we are to find the solutions, to call into council the views of those of our predecessors who have declared any opinion on this subject, in order that we may profit by whatever is sound in their suggestions and avoid their errors.
"The starting-point of our inquiry is an exposition of those characteristics which have chiefly been held to belong to soul in its very nature. Two characteristic marks have above all others been recognized as distinguishing that which has soul in it from that which has not-movement and sensation. It may be said that these two are what our predecessors have fixed upon as characteristic of soul.
"Some say that what originates movement is both pre-eminently and primarily soul; believing that what is not itself moved cannot originate movement in another, they arrived at the view that soul belongs to the class of things in movement. This is what led Democritus to say that soul is a sort of fire or hot substance; his 'forms' or atoms are infinite in number; those which are spherical he calls fire and soul, and compares them to the motes in the air which we see in shafts of light coming through windows; the mixture of seeds of all sorts he calls the elements of the whole of Nature (Leucippus gives a similar account); the spherical atoms are identified with soul because atoms of that shape are most adapted to permeate everywhere, and to set all the others moving by being themselves in movement. This implies the view that soul is identical with what produces movement in animals. That is why, further, they regard respiration as the characteristic mark of life; as the environment compresses the bodies of animals, and tends to extrude those atoms which impart movement to them, because they themselves are never at rest, there must be a reinforcement of these by similar atoms coming in from without in the act of respiration; for they prevent the extrusion of those which are already within by counteracting the compressing and consolidating force of the environment; and animals continue to live only so long as they are able to maintain this resistance."
~ Aristotle; ***On the Soul;*** Book I; #2
HS: "well, there are some things in aristotle that only make sense when viewed wholesale. for example his discussion of the soul only makes sense when one considers the five souls of the living beings. the fivefold distinction i think could be modernised, though an attempt to talk only of 'the soul' without consideration of how Aristotle intends this soul concept to be used (which may be a different way from the christian or hindu soul) would be an injustice to aristotle. what do you think?"
Five souls? Where do you get these ideas? Aristotle held no such belief.
you can call them five powers, or five nutritive faculties or whatever. it's actually 'the powers of the soul' in the original, here's a link for the ancient greek text (http://www.mikrosapoplous.gr/aristotle/psyxhs/2_03.html )
414a27
Τῶν δὲ δυνάμεων τῆς ψυχῆς αἱ λεχθεῖσαι τοῖς μὲν ὑπάρχουσι πᾶσαι, καθάπερ εἴπομεν, τοῖς δὲ τινὲς αὐτῶν, ἐνίοις δὲ μία μόνη. δυνάμεις δ' εἴπομεν θρεπτικόν, αἰσθητικόν, ὀρεκτικόν, κινητικὸν κατὰ τόπον, διανοητικόν.
It's Greek to me!!
In any event, I am sure that there are many times that Aristotle mentioned the number five. But powers of the soul are clearly not the same as souls.
ok, as you wish. the five powers of the soul, or the five potentialities, or whatever. here's a translation i found online at http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/soul.2.ii.html
Part 3
Of the psychic powers above enumerated some kinds of living things, as we have said, possess all, some less than all, others one only. Those we have mentioned are the nutritive, the appetitive, the sensory, the locomotive, and the power of thinking. Plants have none but the first, the nutritive, while another order of living things has this plus the sensory. If any order of living things has the sensory, it must also have the appetitive; for appetite is the genus of which desire, passion, and wish are the species; now all animals have one sense at least, viz. touch, and whatever has a sense has the capacity for pleasure and pain and therefore has pleasant and painful objects present to it, and wherever these are present, there is desire, for desire is just appetition of what is pleasant. Further, all animals have the sense for food (for touch is the sense for food); the food of all living things consists of what is dry, moist, hot, cold, and these are the qualities apprehended by touch; all other sensible qualities are apprehended by touch only indirectly.
so yeah, capacities of the soul rather than souls, my mistake!
HS: "so yeah, capacities of the soul rather than souls, my mistake!"
No problem!!
"The doctrine of the Pythagoreans seems to rest upon the same ideas; some of them declared the motes in air, others what moved them, to be soul. These motes were referred to because they are seen always in movement, even in a complete calm.
"The same tendency is shown by those who define soul as that which moves itself; all seem to hold the view that movement is what is closest to the nature of soul, and that while all else is moved by soul, it alone moves itself. This belief arises from their never seeing anything originating movement which is not first itself moved."
~ Aristotle; ***On the Soul;*** Book I; #2
Similarly also Anaxagoras (and whoever agrees with him in saying that mind set the whole in movement) declares the moving cause of things to be soul. His position must, however, be distinguished from that of Democritus. Democritus roundly identifies soul and mind, for he identifies what appears with what is true-that is why he commends Homer for the phrase 'Hector lay with thought distraught'; he does not employ mind as a special faculty dealing with truth, but identifies soul and mind. What Anaxagoras says about them is more obscure; in many places he tells us that the cause of beauty and order is mind, elsewhere that it is soul; it is found, he says, in all animals, great and small, high and low, but mind (in the sense of intelligence) appears not to belong alike to all animals, and indeed not even to all human beings.
~ Aristotle; ***On the Soul;*** Book I; #2
"All those, then, who had special regard to the fact that what has soul in it is moved, adopted the view that soul is to be identified with what is eminently originative of movement. All, on the other hand, who looked to the fact that what has soul in it knows or perceives what is, identify soul with the principle or principles of Nature, according as they admit several such principles or one only. Thus Empedocles declares that it is formed out of all his elements, each of them also being soul; his words are:
"For 'tis by Earth we see Earth, by Water Water,
By Ether Ether divine, by Fire destructive Fire,
By Love Love, and Hate by cruel Hate."
~ Aristotle; ***On the Soul;*** Book I; #2
"In the same way Plato in the Timaeus fashions soul out of his elements; for like, he holds, is known by like, and things are formed out of the principles or elements, so that soul must be so too. Similarly also in his lectures 'On Philosophy' it was set forth that the Animal-itself is compounded of the Idea itself of the One together with the primary length, breadth, and depth, everything else, the objects of its perception, being similarly constituted. Again he puts his view in yet other terms: Mind is the monad, science or knowledge the dyad (because it goes undeviatingly from one point to another), opinion the number of the plane, sensation the number of the solid; the numbers are by him expressly identified with the Forms themselves or principles, and are formed out of the elements; now things are apprehended either by mind or science or opinion or sensation, and these same numbers are the Forms of things."
~ Aristotle; ***On the Soul;*** Book I; #2
"Some thinkers, accepting both premisses, viz. that the soul is both originative of movement and cognitive, have compounded it of both and declared the soul to be a self-moving number."
~ Aristotle; ***On the Soul;*** Book I; #2
"As to the nature and number of the first principles opinions differ. The difference is greatest between those who regard them as corporeal and those who regard them as incorporeal, and from both dissent those who make a blend and draw their principles from both sources. The number of principles is also in dispute; some admit one only, others assert several. There is a consequent diversity in their several accounts of soul; they assume, naturally enough, that what is in its own nature originative of movement must be among what is primordial. That has led some to regard it as fire, for fire is the subtlest of the elements and nearest to incorporeality; further, in the most primary sense, fire both is moved and originates movement in all the others."
~ Aristotle; ***On the Soul;*** Book I; #2
"Democritus has expressed himself more ingeniously than the rest on the grounds for ascribing each of these two characters to soul; soul and mind are, he says, one and the same thing, and this thing must be one of the primary and indivisible bodies, and its power of originating movement must be due to its fineness of grain and the shape of its atoms; he says that of all the shapes the spherical is the most mobile, and that this is the shape of the particles of fire and mind."
~ Aristotle; ***On the Soul;*** Book I; #2
"Anaxagoras, as we said above, seems to distinguish between soul and mind, but in practice he treats them as a single substance, except that it is mind that he specially posits as the principle of all things; at any rate what he says is that mind alone of all that is simple, unmixed, and pure. He assigns both characteristics, knowing and origination of movement, to the same principle, when he says that it was mind that set the whole in movement."
~ Aristotle; ***On the Soul;*** Book I; #2
"Thales, too, to judge from what is recorded about him, seems to have held soul to be a motive force, since he said that the magnet has a soul in it because it moves the iron."
~ Aristotle; ***On the Soul;*** Book I; #2
Diogenes (and others) held the soul to be air because he believed air to be finest in grain and a first principle; therein lay the grounds of the soul's powers of knowing and originating movement. As the primordial principle from which all other things are derived, it is cognitive; as finest in grain, it has the power to originate movement.
~ Aristotle; ***On the Soul;*** Book I; #2
"Heraclitus too says that the first principle-the 'warm exhalation' of which, according to him, everything else is composed-is soul; further, that this exhalation is most incorporeal and in ceaseless flux; that what is in movement requires that what knows it should be in movement; and that all that is has its being essentially in movement (herein agreeing with the majority)."
~ Aristotle; ***On the Soul;*** Book I; #2
"Alcmaeon also seems to have held a similar view about soul; he says that it is immortal because it resembles 'the immortals,' and that this immortality belongs to it in virtue of its ceaseless movement; for all the 'things divine,' moon, sun, the planets, and the whole heavens, are in perpetual movement."
~ Aristotle; ***On the Soul;*** Book I; #2
"of More superficial writers, some, e.g. Hippo, have pronounced it to be water; they seem to have argued from the fact that the seed of all animals is fluid, for Hippo tries to refute those who say that the soul is blood, on the ground that the seed, which is the primordial soul, is not blood."
~ Aristotle; ***On the Soul;*** Book I; #2
"Another group (Critias, for example) did hold it to be blood; they take perception to be the most characteristic attribute of soul, and hold that perceptiveness is due to the nature of blood."
~ Aristotle; ***On the Soul;*** Book I; #2
"Each of the elements has thus found its partisan, except earth-earth has found no supporter unless we count as such those who have declared soul to be, or to be compounded of, all the elements. All, then, it may be said, characterize the soul by three marks, Movement, Sensation, Incorporeality, and each of these is traced back to the first principles. That is why (with one exception) all those who define the soul by its power of knowing make it either an element or constructed out of the elements. The language they all use is similar; like, they say, is known by like; as the soul knows everything, they construct it out of all the principles. Hence all those who admit but one cause or element, make the soul also one (e.g. fire or air), while those who admit a multiplicity of principles make the soul also multiple. The exception is Anaxagoras; he alone says that mind is impassible and has nothing in common with anything else. But, if this is so, how or in virtue of what cause can it know? That Anaxagoras has not explained, nor can any answer be inferred from his words. All who acknowledge pairs of opposites among their principles, construct the soul also out of these contraries, while those who admit as principles only one contrary of each pair, e.g. either hot or cold, likewise make the soul some one of these. That is why, also, they allow themselves to be guided by the names; those who identify soul with the hot argue that sen (to live) is derived from sein (to boil), while those who identify it with the cold say that soul (psuche) is so called from the process of respiration and (katapsuxis). Such are the traditional opinions concerning soul, together with the grounds on which they are maintained."
~ Aristotle; ***On the Soul;*** Book I; #2
What have we learned so far? Clearly Greek philosophy at the time Aristotle wrote was looking to understand the soul through natural means. Most Greek philosophers seem to have thought the soul was the effect of one of the elements. Others thought it was soul was a sort of number. But none seem to have been looking for any sort of supernatural explanation for the soul.
"We must begin our examination with movement; for doubtless, not only is it false that the essence of soul is correctly described by those who say that it is what moves (or is capable of moving) itself, but it is an impossibility that movement should be even an attribute of it.
We have already pointed out that there is no necessity that what originates movement should itself be moved. There are two senses in which anything may be moved-either (a) indirectly, owing to something other than itself, or (b) directly, owing to itself. Things are 'indirectly moved' which are moved as being contained in something which is moved, e.g. sailors in a ship, for they are moved in a different sense from that in which the ship is moved; the ship is 'directly moved', they are 'indirectly moved', because they are in a moving vessel. This is clear if we consider their limbs; the movement proper to the legs (and so to man) is walking, and in this case the sailors tare not walking. Recognizing the double sense of 'being moved', what we have to consider now is whether the soul is 'directly moved' and participates in such direct movement."
~ Aristotle; ***On the Soul;*** Book I; #3
It is far from clear to me what Aristotle means. Certainly a ship is moved by winds or by galley slaves. Ships do not move themselves. I do not think Aristotle is saying they do. Unquestionably he knew that they do not.
We know, of course, that Aristotle believed that being is not all of one sort. The distinctions implied by the ten categories may lie behind his thought. Thus the color red is indirectly moved whenever red things are moved. Is such a movement proper to the soul?
On the other hand, we know that he believed that there is a First Cause of movement... something which moves others without being moved, itself. Perhaps that is what he is getting at. He didn't, however, make that clear. And such an interpretation would not fit in with the analogy to a ship and its sailors.
What is clear is that he distinguishes between things moved directly and things indirectly moved. Thus the question, whether the soul is 'directly moved' and participates in such direct movement.
"There are four species of movement-locomotion, alteration, diminution, growth; consequently if the soul is moved, it must be moved with one or several or all of these species of movement. Now if its movement is not incidental, there must be a movement natural to it, and, if so, as all the species enumerated involve place, place must be natural to it. But if the essence of soul be to move itself, its being moved cannot be incidental to-as it is to what is white or three cubits long; they too can be moved, but only incidentally-what is moved is that of which 'white' and 'three cubits long' are the attributes, the body in which they inhere; hence they have no place: but if the soul naturally partakes in movement, it follows that it must have a place."
~ Aristotle; ***On the Soul;*** Book I; #3
If the very essence of soul is to move itself, then its motion can not be incidental to it. Therefore its movement must be natural to it.
What sort of movements are natural? According to Aristotle, fire naturally moves upward; earth naturally moves downward; the quintessence naturally moves in the heavenly circles.
What then is the natural movement of the soul?
"Further, if there be a movement natural to the soul, there must be a counter-movement unnatural to it, and conversely. The same applies to rest as well as to movement; for the terminus ad quem of a thing's natural movement is the place of its natural rest, and similarly the terminus ad quem of its enforced movement is the place of its enforced rest. But what meaning can be attached to enforced movements or rests of the soul, it is difficult even to imagine."
~ Aristotle; ***On the Soul;*** Book I; #3
In my humble opinion, Aristotle's argument is irrelevant. If one did not know the natural movement of fire or earth or the heavens, it would seem to be equally hard to imagine their counter-movements. If one did not know the natural resting place of fire or earth, it would seem to be equally hard to imagine their enforced resting places. Thus there is nothing unique to soul in that regard.
"Further, if the natural movement of the soul be upward, the soul must be fire; if downward, it must be earth; for upward and downward movements are the definitory characteristics of these bodies. The same reasoning applies to the intermediate movements, termini, and bodies. Further, since the soul is observed to originate movement in the body, it is reasonable to suppose that it transmits to the body the movements by which it itself is moved, and so, reversing the order, we may infer from the movements of the body back to similar movements of the soul. Now the body is moved from place to place with movements of locomotion. Hence it would follow that the soul too must in accordance with the body change either its place as a whole or the relative places of its parts. This carries with it the possibility that the soul might even quit its body and re-enter it, and with this would be involved the possibility of a resurrection of animals from the dead. But, it may be contended, the soul can be moved indirectly by something else; for an animal can be pushed out of its course. Yes, but that to whose essence belongs the power of being moved by itself, cannot be moved by something else except incidentally, just as what is good by or in itself cannot owe its goodness to something external to it or to some end to which it is a means."
~ Aristotle; ***On the Soul;*** Book I; #3
If I recall correctly, the Latin translation used by Thomas Aquinas contains a gloss on the stating that resurrection is absurd.
"If the soul is moved, the most probable view is that what moves it is sensible things."
~ Aristotle; ***On the Soul;*** Book I; #3
VS: "o bill
you are talking to yourself!!
shd i be afraid ?"
Good exercise...
"We must note also that, if the soul moves itself, it must be the mover itself that is moved, so that it follows that if movement is in every case a displacement of that which is in movement, in that respect in which it is said to be moved, the movement of the soul must be a departure from its essential nature, at least if its self-movement is essential to it, not incidental."
~ Aristotle; ***On the Soul;*** Book I; #3
The argument would seem to apply equally to fire, earth and the heavenly fifth element.
I am - that's why I haven't had the opportunity to read your comments on Aristotle :-(
"Some go so far as to hold that the movements which the soul imparts to the body in which it is are the same in kind as those with which it itself is moved. An example of this is Democritus, who uses language like that of the comic dramatist Philippus, who accounts for the movements that Daedalus imparted to his wooden Aphrodite by saying that he poured quicksilver into it; similarly Democritus says that the spherical atoms which according to him constitute soul, owing to their own ceaseless movements draw the whole body after them and so produce its movements. We must urge the question whether it is these very same atoms which produce rest also-how they could do so, it is difficult and even impossible to say. And, in general, we may object that it is not in this way that the soul appears to originate movement in animals-it is through intention or process of thinking."
~ Aristotle; ***On the Soul;*** Book I; #3
If the soul is matter then it is natural to think that it would move the body as an efficient cause of motion, merely pushing the body about. But is the soul matter?
What are intention and thought? Are they matter? How do they move us --- as they seem to do?
VS: "what if they r just impulses ? and nothing to do with matter ?"
What is an impulse? Is it not a force doing work? Suppose I have a two pound weight and I lift it two feet. I have done 4 foot-pounds of work.
Is that what you mean by impulse?
Ven:
To Aristotle, intention and though were immaterial. He is trying to point out that the soul is itself, somehow immaterial as well.
Such a notion is radically contrary to the whole thrust of Greek thought. Thus he points out how Democritus believed that the soul was constructed from spherical atoms. The image I get from that is that the soul is a sort of liquid, pulling the body about wherever it flows.
Aristotle wished to reduce that idea to an absurdity.
You have in your own way pointed out another question we ought to investigate. What are the passions or impulses which move us? How are they related to thought and to the soul? Are they just physical forces, pulling us about wherever the soul flows?
I believe Aristotle will investigate those questions later on. We shall see...
"It is in the same fashion that the Timaeus also tries to give a physical account of how the soul moves its body; the soul, it is there said, is in movement, and so owing to their mutual implication moves the body also. After compounding the soul-substance out of the elements and dividing it in accordance with the harmonic numbers, in order that it may possess a connate sensibility for 'harmony' and that the whole may move in movements well attuned, the Demiurge bent the straight line into a circle; this single circle he divided into two circles united at two common points; one of these he subdivided into seven circles. All this implies that the movements of the soul are identified with the local movements of the heavens."
~ Aristotle; ***On the Soul;*** Book I; #3
The ***Timaeus*** is, of course, one of the Dialogues of Plato. It is a rather strange work. Socrates was only marginally involved in it. Timaeus was the primary speaker.
I interpret the dialogue as a record of pure speculation, unrelated to the rest of Plato's thought.
Aristotle used this dialogue as an indictment of Plato's system as a whole. He seems to have been of the opinion that one shouldn't pay any attention to a thing Plato wrote, given the absurdity of the ***Timaeus.***
The ***Timaeus*** is the only one of Plato's Dialogues which was known in the West until fairly modern times. As a result, the West judged Plato solely upon the ***Timaeus*** and Aristotle's comments.
In any event, it is the ***Timaeus*** where Aristotle looked to find Plato's opinions on the soul.
"Now, in the first place, it is a mistake to say that the soul is a spatial magnitude. It is evident that Plato means the soul of the whole to be like the sort of soul which is called mind not like the sensitive or the desiderative soul, for the movements of neither of these are circular. Now mind is one and continuous in the sense in which the process of thinking is so, and thinking is identical with the thoughts which are its parts; these have a serial unity like that of number, not a unity like that of a spatial magnitude. Hence mind cannot have that kind of unity either; mind is either without parts or is continuous in some other way than that which characterizes a spatial magnitude. How, indeed, if it were a spatial magnitude, could mind possibly think? Will it think with any one indifferently of its parts? In this case, the 'part' must be understood either in the sense of a spatial magnitude or in the sense of a point (if a point can be called a part of a spatial magnitude). If we accept the latter alternative, the points being infinite in number, obviously the mind can never exhaustively traverse them; if the former, the mind must think the same thing over and over again, indeed an infinite number of times (whereas it is manifestly possible to think a thing once only). If contact of any part whatsoever of itself with the object is all that is required, why need mind move in a circle, or indeed possess magnitude at all? On the other hand, if contact with the whole circle is necessary, what meaning can be given to the contact of the parts? Further, how could what has no parts think what has parts, or what has parts think what has none? We must identify the circle referred to with mind; for it is mind whose movement is thinking, and it is the circle whose movement is revolution, so that if thinking is a movement of revolution, the circle which has this characteristic movement must be mind."
~ Aristotle; ***On the Soul;*** Book I; #3
"If the circular movement is eternal, there must be something which mind is always thinking-what can this be? For all practical processes of thinking have limits-they all go on for the sake of something outside the process, and all theoretical processes come to a close in the same way as the phrases in speech which express processes and results of thinking. Every such linguistic phrase is either definitory or demonstrative. Demonstration has both a starting-point and may be said to end in a conclusion or inferred result; even if the process never reaches final completion, at any rate it never returns upon itself again to its starting-point, it goes on assuming a fresh middle term or a fresh extreme, and moves straight forward, but circular movement returns to its starting-point. Definitions, too, are closed groups of terms."
~ Aristotle; ***On the Soul;*** Book I; #3
I understand that in ancient Greek, verbs had three 'voices,' the active voice, "he moves;" the passive voice, "he is moved;" and the reflexive voice, "he moves himself." I further understand that for many verbs the passive voice and the reflexive voice were identical forms. Thus one word would be used for both passive and reflexive forms. I do not know how that distinction might affect the proper interpretation of the passage in question. Not knowing the Greek text and not having good notes on the translation, I can not say how to interpret it.
Aristotle wrote "there is no necessity that what originates movement should itself be moved."
As it seems to me, he could be referring to the First Cause, an unmoved mover... or perhaps he is saying that the soul which originates movements in the body is not itself moved. The second interpretation might have led to the comparison to sailors in a ship. The first interpretation probably would not.
The second interpretation is strengthened by the fact that in Book II he wrote "From this it indubitably follows that the soul is inseparable from its body, or at any rate that certain parts of it are (if it has parts) for the actuality of some of them is nothing but the actualities of their bodily parts. Yet some may be separable because they are not the actualities of any body at all. Further, we have no light on the problem whether the soul may not be the actuality of its body in the sense in which the sailor is the actuality of the ship."
I believe Aristotle may be saying that the ship is to the animal's body as the sailor is to the animal's soul.
Unlike the ship which doesn't move itself, but is moved by the winds; the animal body does move itself. Meanwhile the animal soul which doesn't move itself, originates the movements of the animal body. If the soul is moved at all, it is in the sense that the body moves and the soul --- like the sailor on a ship --- moves with the body.
Not that I can see. The animal body is the material cause of its movements. The animal soul is the formal cause of those movements.
It is not clear whether Aristotle would agree that the body and soul are different 'things.' The body would not exist without its soul. The animal is a single substance, having the body as its material cause and the soul as its formal cause. Thus it is the animal that moves.
But we are jumping ahead of the argument.
"Further, if the same revolution is repeated, mind must repeatedly think the same object."
~ Aristotle; ***On the Soul;*** Book I; #3
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