On Aristotle's "On the Soul 1.3-5" - Ancient Commentators on Aristotle - Philoponus - Books - Cornell University Press - 9780801444968 - June 29, 2006
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On Aristotle's "On the Soul 1.3-5" - Ancient Commentators on Aristotle 1st edition


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This text by Philoponus rejects accounts of soul, or as we would say of mind, which define it as moving, as cognitive, or in physical terms. Chapter 3 considers Aristotle's attack on the idea that the soul is in motion. This was an attack partly on his teacher, Plato, since Plato defines the soul as self-moving. Philoponus agrees with Aristotle's attack on the idea that a thing must be in motion in order to cause motion. But he offers what may be Ammonius' interpretation of Plato's apparently physicalistic account of the soul in the Timaeus as symbolic. What we would call the mind-body relation is the subject of Chapter 4. Plato and Aristotle attacked a physicalistic theory of soul, which suggested it was the blend, ratio, or harmonious proportion of ingredients in the body. Philoponus attacked the theory too, but we learn from him that Epicurus had defended it. In Chapter 5, Philoponus endorses Aristotle's rejection of the idea that the soul is particles and of Empedocles' idea that the soul must be made of all four elements in order to know what is made of the same elements. He also rejects, with Aristotle, definitions of the soul as moving or cognitive as ignoring lower forms of life. He finally discusses Aristotle's rejection of Plato's localisation of parts of the soul in parts of the body, but asks if new knowledge of the brain and the nerves do not require some kind of localisation.


232 pages

Media Books     Hardcover Book   (Book with hard spine and cover)
Released June 29, 2006
ISBN13 9780801444968
Publishers Cornell University Press
Pages 232
Dimensions 150 × 220 × 20 mm   ·   494 g
Language English  
Translator Eijk, Philip J. van der

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