Aristotle’s Idea of the Soul

188 Pages·1996·4.21 MB·English

by  Herbert Granger (auth.)

ARISTOTLE'S IDEA OF THE SOUL
PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES SERIES
VOLUME68
Founded by Wilfrid S. Sellars and Keith Lehrer
Editor
Keith Lehrer, University ofA rizona, Tucson
Associate Editor
Stewart Cohen, Arizona State University, Tempe
Board of Consulting Editors
Lynne Rudder Baker, University ofM assachusetts at Amherst
Allan Gibbard, University of Michigan
Denise Meyerson, University of Cape Town
Ronald D. Milo, University ofA rizona, Tucson
Fran~ois Recanati, Ecole Polytechnique, Paris
Stuart Silvers, Clemson University
Nicholas D. Smith, Michigan State University
The titles published in this series are listed at the end of this volume.
ARISTOTLE'S IDEA
OF THE SOUL
HERBERT GRANGER
Department of Philosophy,
Wayne State University,
College of Liberal Arts, Detroit, U.S.A.
SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.
A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-90-481-4700-7 ISBN 978-94-017-0785-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-017-0785-5
Printed on acid-free paper
All Rights Reserved
© 1996 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1996
No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner.
For my Father and
in memory of my Mother
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements IX
Chapter 1: Introduction 1
1. Preliminary Remarks 2
2. Attributivism and Substantialism 8
Chapter 2: The Case for Attributivism 15
Chapter 3: A Taxonomy for Attributivism 29
1. Realism and Rationalism 29
2. Functionalism and Realism 31
3. Rationalism versus Realism 44
4. The Superiority of Rationalism 48
Chapter 4: The Case for Substantialism 57
1. Substancehood 58
2. Active Mind 59
3. Particularity 60
4. Identity 62
5. Subjecthood 64
5.1. Aristotle's Attributions of Subjecthood 66
5.2. The Rylean Passage 76
Chapter 5: A Taxonomy for Substantialism 83
1. Kind Dualism 84
2. Constitutionalism 89
3. Kind Dualism plus Constitutionalism 93
4. Supervenient Dualism 102
Chapter 6: The Agency of the Soul: The Case for 111
Substantialism Reconsidered
1. Causality 112
2. The Case for the Causal Agency of Soul 115
Chapter 7: The Nature of Soul: The Property-Thing 133
1. The Provenance of Aristotle's Attributivism 135
2. The Provenance of Aristotle's Substantialism 143
3. The Nature of the Property-Thing 156
Appendix: Additional Realists and Rationalists 159
1. The Realists 159
2. The Rationalists 163
Abbreviations 167
Bibliography 169
Genera/Index 175
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am grateful to many for their encouragement and advice. Among these I wish to
extend my special thanks to E. B. Allaire, Frank Lewis, A. P. D. Mourelatos, and two
of my colleagues at Wayne State University, Lawrence Lombard and Lawrence Powers.
I also wish to acknowledge my considerable debt to the late Gerald Powers for his
encouragement and for the many conversations we had about the topics of my book. I
should like, however, especially to thank Daniel Graham for his careful reading of the
penultimate draft of my book and his helpful suggestions for improving it.
I should also like to express my gratitude to the National Endowment for the
Humanities for the grant of a summer stipend for 1989, which provided me with my
earliest support. I also wish to thank Wayne State University for a Faculty Research
Award for 1990, and for the award ofthe Career Development Chair, which, among its
generous benefits, freed me of my teaching duties for the academic year of 1992-1993.
I am also grateful to Wayne State for a sabbatical for 1994-1995, which provided me
with the opportunity to put my book in what was essentially its final form. Bruce
Russell, the chairman of my department, deserves special thanks for his invaluable
support in my competition for the Career Development Chair and also for his
providing me with a research assistant to help with developing the index and with
preparing the text for publication. I am especially grateful to that assistant, Paul
Wagoner, whose hard work and good judgment have been indispensable. I also wish to
thank my colleague, Robert Yanal, for the time he generously spent in advising me and
providing the materials I needed to prepare the book for publication. Above all, I am
grateful to my wife, Gina Granger, not only for her encouragement, but especially for
her loving patience.
Portions of my 'Aristotle and the Functionalist Debate', Apeiron: A Journal for
Ancient Philosophy and Science (1990) 23, 27-49, are integrated into Chapter 3,
Sections 1 and 2, and Chapter 6, Section 2. Paragraphs from my 'Aristotle and the
Concept of Supervenience', The Southern Journal of Philosophy (1993) 31, 161-177,
and my 'Supervenient Dualism', Ratio N.S. (1994) 7, 1-13, are included in Chapter 5,
Section 4. Parts of my 'Aristotle on the Subjecthood of Form' and 'The Subjecthood
of Form: A Reply to Shields', Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy (1995) 13, 135-
159 and 177-186, are included in Sections 5.1 and 5.2 of Chapter 4. I am grateful to
the editors of these publications for their permission to reproduce the passages from
my articles.
H. Granger
Detroit
January, 1996
ix
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
This essay is devoted to Aristotle's conception of the nature of soul or form within his
natural philosophy, in particular, within his psychology, which is at the heart of his
natural philosophy. The central question of this essay is that of the ontological or
metaphysical nature of the form of the 'composite substance' of matter and form, or
what in Aristotle's psychology is the 'soul' of organisms. The ontological nature of
form or soul is a topic of considerable controversy today among Aristotelian scholars,
and the question of the universality or the particularity of form has lately received the
most attention.1 It is not, however, this dispute that captures at its deepest level the
character of the disagreement among the commentators of today over the nature of form.
The contention of this essay is that contemporary interpretations of Aristotle, within
the analytic tradition, divide into two main camps over the nature of soul or form:
'attributivism', in which soul is conceived as a 'property'; 'substantialism', in which
soul is conceived, in contrast with a property, as a 'thing', a subject of properties. Thus
the contemporary analytic scholarship on the nature of the soul may be better appreci
ated as a debate between the contending camps of attributivism and substantialism. The
view of this essay, however, is that both camps miss the point when they attempt to
force Aristotle's idea of soul or form neatly into the familiar categories of conception
of property and thing, neither of which it falls within in any straightforward way. The
correct formulation of Aristotle's conception of the soul must register the fact that he
ascribes to the soul features that should belong exclusively to a thing and also features
that should belong exclusively to a property. Soul on Aristotle's account is a cross be
tween a thing and a property-what we might call a 'property-thing' for want of a bet
ter description2-rather than exclusively a property or exclusively a thing. The soul as
a 'property-thing' is a confused notion, and it would be a mistake to think that it rep
resents some hitherto unknown ontological category or category of conception. This
1Frede and Patzig (1988, i. 48-57, ii. 241-263) hold a commanding position within this debate, in which
they maintain forcefully the particularity of form. It was R. Albritton (1957), who in recent times set the
stage for the discussion of the particularity of form. Besides Frede and Patzig, others who have recently
argued for the particularity of form (but not necessarily its thinghood) include W. Sellars (1959), D. Wig
gins (1967), R. Heinaman (1979), A. C. Lloyd (1981), T. Irwin (1988), C. Witt (1989), and J. Whiting
(1991 ). Prominent among recent scholars who argue for the 'universality', or in some sense the
'generality' of form, are G. E. L. Owen (1966), M. Burnyeat (1979), M. J. Woods (1967), J. Driscoll
(1981), A. Code (1984), M. Furth (1988), J. Lear (1988), M. Loux (1991), and F. Lewis (1991). The par
ticularity of form is considered in the case for substantialism in Chapter 4, Section 3. Those who defend in
some sense the 'universality' of form are reviewed briefly in n. 16 of this chapter.
2'Property-thing' is in imitation of the phrase, 'quality-thing', which F. M. Cornford (1930), and later after
him G. Vlastos (1950), use to describe the way the presocratic natural philosophers conceived of the
'opposites', hot, cold, dry, moist, and the like, which were fundamental to their explanations of natural
phenomena.
2 CHAPTER 1
essay considers the cases for 'attributivism' and 'substantialism', and it maps out a
taxonomy for each of them by considering prominent examples of them. In disagree
ment with both attributivism and substantialism, this essay argues for the soul of Aris
totle's psychology as the 'property-thing', and it takes as its basic task the formulation
of a plausible explanation for Aristotle's coming by his confused conception of the
soul.
1. PRELIMINARY REMARKS
Aristotle devotes much of his attention to 'natural philosophy', and probably the bulk
of his surviving work concerns one issue or another relevant to his natural philosophy.
The domain of natural philosophy includes all natural objects, which are objects that
stand in sharp contrast with non-natural or artificial objects. Natural objects are subject
through their own nature to their own natural changes or motions. Unlike artifacts,
they possess a 'nature' (qJvcn~) that serves as an innate principle of change which is re
sponsible for the various sorts of change they naturally undergo. Paradigms of natural
objects are plants and animals, and their natural changes include their generation and
destruction, increase and decrease in size, the progress of their maturation and the de
cline of their decay, their natural mode of locomotion, and simply any sort of change,
activity, or 'motion' that is an expression of their nature. Natural objects include, not
only the plants and animals of the sublunar realm, but also all the astronomical objects
of the superlunar realm, the planets, sun, moon, and stars. These are eternal and un
changing except for their constant circular motion about the earth, and they are natural
objects because they possess their own principle of motion, which keeps them moving
in their circular orbits. Aristotle also believes that this feature of naturalness applies
just as well to the inanimate or inorganic elements of his chemistry, which are the four
'elements' of air, earth, fire, and water, and it applies in an extended fashion, through
the nature of the elements that make them up, to the various naturally occurring com
pounds of these elements: stones, metals, gems, and the like. The elements too undergo
natural change or change as an expression of their nature. They move locally in a natu
ral fashion and have natural places of rest as the natural ends of their locomotion, and
they also emerge naturally from one another: the decay of one element gives rise to an
other. The domain of natural philosophy covers, then, all those objects, both sublunar
and superlunar, which go through some sort of natural change as a function of their
own nature.
Physicalism in its rise to supremacy in the latter half of this century has left its
mark on the study of Aristotle's natural philosophy, and there has been a variety of
important attempts to make Aristotle over into a respectable physicalist through
physicalist interpretations of his natural philosophy and psychology. Physicalism
takes a variety of forms, but in its fundamentals it is the view that all objects are
physical objects, and their physical properties are the primitive or unanalyzable
properties of modern physics and the properties defined in terms of those primitive
INTRODUCTION 3
properties.3 'Strong physicalism' limits the properties of objects to physical properties.
'Weak physicalism' allows that some properties, for example, mental properties, are
non-physical properties, despite the physicality of their subjects, and these non
physical properties are not identical with or reducible to any physical properties.
Accordingly, weak physicalism furnishes a form of 'non-reductive' physicalism. Those
physicalists who tolerate non-physical properties do not think that their toleration
sullies the wholesomeness of their physicalism, which they take to be protected by
their admitting into their ontology only physical objects for the subjects of every sort
of property. Central in the endeavor to interpret Aristotle's natural philosophy in terms
of physicalism has been the effort to view his psychology, or 'philosophy of soul', in
terms of some variety of physicalism. The attention paid to his psychology in the
study of his natural philosophy is justified because his psychology extends well
beyond the domain of mentality, which is what today would be regarded as the only
legitimate sphere of psychology. Aristotle's psychology, however, has for its subject
matter every vital activity of every living thing: not just thought, perception, emotion,
and desire, but also reproduction, nutrition, locomotion, growth and decay. For
Aristotle even plants have souls because they are alive, and his psychology and
biology have exactly the same extension.
Aristotle can have a broad based psychology because he develops it in terms of his
doctrine of 'hylomorphism', which he uses to explain the nature of every sort of object,
be it alive or not, natural or artificial. Hylomorphism holds that objects are a product
of their matter (vA.rl) and form (el8ot;). The matter of an object is the stuff that
constitutes it or the things that compose its parts: in the simple case of artifacts, which
provide Aristotle with his paradigmatic examples of informed material objects, matter
would be, for example, the bronze of a bronze sphere or the bricks and timber of a
house. The form of the bronze sphere is its spherical shape; the form of the house is
the complex arrangement of its material parts. Aristotle expands upon his hylomorphic
doctrine within his doctrine of 'causality', or, as most today would prefer to say, his
doctrine of 'explanation', in the form of his doctrine of the 'four causes' (Phys. 2.3 and
2.7), the causality of which Aristotle distributes among the matter and form of his
hylomorphic doctrine. Aristotle's doctrine of causality is complex, and Chapters 6 and
7 will consider it in more depth. Matter is the 'material cause', the material
constitution of an object, from which the object emerges. Form is primarily credited
with the causality of the 'formal cause', which is the 'nature' or 'essence' of an object,
which Aristotle typically describes as what makes up the content of the object's
definition. Form too Aristotle most often endows with the causality of the other two
causes, the 'final' and 'efficient causes'. The 'final cause'. is the purpose or end of an
object, an appeal to which provides the teleological explanation of the object, and
often Aristotle simply identifies the formal and final cause. The 'efficient cause' is the
source of the motion or change that gives rise to an object or to the changes natural to
an object, and Aristotle also describes the 'efficient cause' as the source of rest from
motion or change. The 'efficient cause', or the 'whence the first beginning of change or
3For the view that the 'physical' is defined in terms of contemporary theoretical physics, see G. P. Hell
man and F. W. Thompson (1975).