ARISTOTLE’S CONCEPT OF SOUL by Jacob Nannattumalil B09026

ARISTOTLE'S CONCEPT OF SOUL

A soul, in certain spiritual, philosophical, and psychological traditions, is the incorporeal essence of a person or living thing. It is the ultimate internal principle by which we think, feel, and will, and by which our bodies are animated. Aristotle defined the soul as the core or "essence" of a living being, but argued against its having a separate existence in its entirety. In Aristotle's view, a living thing's soul is its activity, that is, its "life".

Aristotle's theory, as it is presented primarily in the De Anima( On The Soul ) comes very close to providing a comprehensive, fully developed account of the soul in all its aspects and functions, an account that articulates the ways in which all of the vital functions of all animate organisms are related to the soul. According to Aristotle's theory, a soul is a particular kind of nature, a principle that accounts for change and rest in the particular case of living bodies, i.e. plants, non-human animals and human beings. We can describe the theory as furnishing a unified explanatory framework within which all vital functions alike, from metabolism to reasoning, are treated as functions performed by natural organisms of suitable structure and complexity. The soul of an animate organism, in this framework, is nothing other than its system of active abilities to perform the vital functions that organisms of its kind naturally perform, so that when an organism engages in the relevant activities (e.g., nutrition, movement or thought) it does so in virtue of the system of abilities, that is its soul. The soul is a system of abilities possessed and manifested by animate bodies of suitable structure, it is clear that the soul is not itself a body or a corporeal thing.  For Aristotle, the soul is a system of abilities possessed and manifested by animate bodies of suitable structure, therefore soul is not itself a body or a corporeal thing. The soul is the "first actuality" of a body: its capacity simply for life itself, apart from the various faculties of the soul, such as sensation, nutrition and so forth, which when exercised constitute its "second" actuality, which we might call its "fulfillment." The rational activity of the soul's intellective part, along with that of the soul's two other parts—its vegetative and animal parts, which it has in common with other animals—thus in Aristotle's view constitute the essence of a human soul.

Sources: Aristolte For Everybody: difficult Thought Made Easy by Mortinger. J. Adler

                New Encyclopedi of Philosophy by J. Grooten