Aristotle: Philosophy of Mind

In DA I.2–5, Aristotle offers a series of critical discussions of earlier Greek definitions of the soul. The status of these discussions and the role they play in the justification of Aristotle’s theory of soul in DA II–III is controversial. In contrast to a common view, I argue that these discussions are not dialectical but philosophical. I also contend that Aristotle does not consider earlier philosophical definitions of soul to be endoxa, but rather contradoxa – beliefs about which the many (...) and the wise disagree among themselves. Through an analysis of Plato’s and Empedocles’s definitions of soul, I show that these definitions are nevertheless treated by Aristotle as potential scientific principles for explaining two of the soul’s per se attributes: causing motion and cognition in animate bodies. The main role of the critical discussions in DA I.2–5 is to show that all such earlier definitions of soul fail this explanatory task. Nevertheless, I show that these chapters are not wholly aporetic. Aristotle makes progress by solving two scientific puzzles within them: whether the soul has spatial parts, and whether ‘soul’ refers to a uniform entity across biological species. (shrink)

Aristotle presents perception as a potentially intelligent form of cognition—a form of cognition that allows us to respond in knowing ways to a range of different situations, or to develop certain insights into some topic of scientific inquiry. But it’s not clear how we should understand the interaction between our rational and perceptual powers in these cases, or how widespread we should take their interaction to be. In this paper I argue against views on which human perception would always involve (...) the use of our rational powers, or on which the value of our perceptual powers would always be understood in terms of the rational modes of thought they might promote. I then develop an alternative account of intelligent perception that seeks to do justice to the role Aristotle assigns nonrational uses of perception in his account of our learning, and to his emphasis on the continuity between animal and human forms of cognition. (shrink)

The discussions of conatus – force, tendency, effort, and striving – in early modern metaphysics have roots in Aristotle’s understanding of life as an internal experience of living force. This paper examines the ways that Spinoza’s conatus is consonant with Aristotle on effort. By tracking effort from his psychology and ethics to aesthetics, I show there is a conatus at the heart of the activity of the ψυχή that involves an intensification of power in a way which anticipates many of (...) the central insights of early modern and 20th century European philosophy. The first section outlines how Aristotle’s developmental conception of the soul as geometrically ordered lays the foundation for his understanding of effort. The developmental series of powers of the soul are analogous to the series of shapes in mathematics. The second section links the striving of the soul to the gradual acquisition of virtues as a directed activity unifying multiplicity. The third examines the paradigm of self-awareness that Aristotelian effort involves. In the final section I show how ancient Greek theories of music were founded on the experience of striving. The “nature” of music is defined by Aristoxenus, and Theophrastus, in relation to the passion and intentionality of the soul. The geometrical order, as a synthesis of elements in geometry, music, or ethics, is a generative process in which past elements are retained and reintegrated in later stages of development. It requires effort to think geometrically, and the progress of knowledge itself is an integral aspect of all effort. Effort is the lived and self-aware cause which, moving step by step in an orderly and deliberate way, grows and advances upon itself. For both Spinoza and Aristotle, effort is the immanent intelligence which accomplishes what is in the purview of its understanding. Thus, will, in this conception of effort, is not something we already possess innately, but emerges gradually by an effort aimed at improvement. (shrink)

_Concept Formation_ is the final part of the trilogy _Forms of Representation in the Aristotelian Tradition_. It investigates some of the most perplexing and provocative discussions on conceptual thinking in the Greek, Latin, and Arabic reception of Aristotle’s psychology.

_Dreaming_ is the second part of the trilogy _Forms of Representation in the Aristotelian Tradition_. It investigates some of the most fascinating and enduring discussions on dreams in the Greek, Latin, and Arabic reception of Aristotle’s psychology.

I offer a novel analysis of the relations between Aristotle’s three species of desire - appetite, temper, and wish - and the three things he says in EN 2.3 lead to pursuit - the pleasant, the beneficial, and the noble. It has long been tempting to think that these trios line up with one another in some way, ideally relating their members in one-to-one fashion. One account, by John Cooper, has gathered prominent adherents, but other authors, notably Giles Pearson, have (...) argued we should give up on even trying to correlate the two trios. I attempt to show that the two trios do relate in interesting ways, but not in a way that correlates their members in a one-to-one fashion. Instead, I argue that both appetite and temper are ultimately for the pleasant, while all things that an agent takes as objects of wish are conceived of as either pleasant, beneficial, or noble. This account conflicts with a dominant understanding of the species of desire as differentiated by their objects. I reply defend the view by showing that there is a second criterion for differentiating the species of desire. (shrink)

The image of a copy of Praxiteles’ Aphrodite—nude but demurely shielding her pubic region—which adorns the dust cover of Pearson’s superb monograph, Aristotle on Desire</i>), suggests to the casual book buyer that the volume encased therein will explain Aristotle’s thoughts about sexual desire—perhaps as a central part or the paradigm case of his general theory of desire. But the goddess likes being tricky: Aristotle has very little to say about sexual desire (at best it is a subcategory of <i>epithumia</i>, set (...) alongside the desires for eating and drinking and reduced to tactile stimulation), and it is not immediately apparent that he possesses a general theory or account of desire. No doubt, Aristotle discusses many aspects of <i>orexis</i> (Aristotle’s general term for desire) in relationship to human action, in his consideration of the rhetorical manipulation of the emotions, and in his examination of animate motion. But as Pearson notes, neither in Aristotle’s catalog of writings nor in his surviving works is there an Aristotelian <i>peri orexeôs</i>. Pearson’s monograph, which is the “distant descendant” of a Ph.D. completed at Cambridge in 2004, thus is an exercise in detective work which combs through Aristotle’s discussions of desire throughout the corpus (albeit with focus on the ethical treatises, the <i>Rhetoric</i>, and <i>De Anima</i>) in order to reconstruct what a general theory of desire would look like for Aristotle. Pearson does a masterful job at drawing together into a coherent whole many of Aristotle’s scattered remarks about the different aspects of desire and provides a model for textual analysis of philosophically abstruse passages. Along the way, he overturns a number of scholarly orthodoxies (for instance, that Aristotle’s account of <i>thumos</i> retains elements of Platonic <i>thumos</i> or “spiritedness” or that <i>thumos</i> has a unique relationship to the <i>kalon</i> or what is fine) and situates Aristotle’s theory amidst contemporary philosophers of desire such as Thomas Nagle, Thomas Scanlon, and G.F. Schuler. The result is a landmark work of scholarship that scholars working on Aristotle’s moral psychology will need to engage and argue with. Whether the work warrants the adornment of Aphrodite is a question to which I will return in my conclusion. (shrink)

William Gilbert’s 1600 book, De magnete, greatly influenced early modern natural philosophy. The book describes an impressive array of physical experiments, but it also advances a metaphysical view at odds with the soon to emerge mechanical philosophy. That view was animism. I distinguish two kinds of animism – Aristotelian and Platonic – and argue that Gilbert was an Aristotelian animist. Taking Robert Boyle as an example, I then show that early modern arguments against animism were often effective only against Platonic (...) animism. In fact, unacknowledged traces of Aristotelian animism can be found in Boyle’s mechanical account of nature. This was Gilbert’s legacy. (shrink)

Scholarship on Aristotle’s theory of visual perception has traditionally held that Aristotle had a single, static, conception of light and that he believed that illumination occurred prior to and independent of the actions of colours. I contend that this view precludes the medium from becoming actually transparent, thus making vision impossible. I here offer an alternative to the traditional interpretation, using contemporary conceptual tools to make good philosophical sense of Aristotle’s position. I call my view the ‘ecological’ interpretation. It postulates (...) two conceptions of light: non-visible mobile propagated light and visible static illumination produced by the interaction of propagated light with the environment’s coloured textured surfaces. I argue that these contemporary conceptual tools can !nd a foothold in and consistently enrich Aristotle’s extant position and that, with their aid, we can restore coherence to his theories of light and vision. (shrink)

Three times in Book 1 chapter 13 of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle says desire partakes of reason in a way. There is a consensus view in the literature about what that claim means: desire has no intrinsic rationality, but can partake of reason by being blindly obedient to the commands of reason. I argue this consensus view is mistaken: for Aristotle, adult human desire has its own intrinsic rationality, and while it is to be obedient to reason, it is not (...) blind obedience, for when reason tells desire to obey, it includes an explanation supporting its order which desire can at least potentially understand. Thus, the nature of human desire, and also of the characteristic interaction of desire and reason, is much different than it is standardly taken to be. (shrink)

This volume focuses on philosophical problems concerning sense perception in the history of philosophy. It consists of thirteen essays that analyse the philosophical tradition originating in Aristotle’s writings. Each essay tackles a particular problem that tests the limits of Aristotle’s theory of perception and develops it in new directions. The problems discussed range from simultaneous perception to causality in perception, from the representational nature of sense-objects to the role of conscious attention, and from the physical/mental divide to perception as quasi-rational (...) judgement. -/- The volume gives an equal footing to Greek, Arabic, and Latin philosophical traditions. It makes a substantial contribution not just to the study of the Aristotelian analysis of sense perception, but to its reception in the commentary tradition and beyond. Thus, the papers address developments in Alexander of Aphrodisias, Themistius, Avicenna, John of Jandun, Nicole Oresme, and Sayf al-Din al-Amidi, among others. The result of this is a coherent collection that attacks a well-defined topic from a wide range of perspectives and across philosophical traditions. (shrink)

I explain what Aristotle means when, after puzzling about the matter of motion in incomplete animals, he suggests in De Anima III 11.433b31–434a5 that just as incomplete animals are moved indeterminately, desire and phantasia are present in those animals, but present indeterminately. I argue that self-motion and its directing faculties in incomplete animals differ in degree but not in kind from those of complete animals. I examine how an object of desire differs for an incomplete animal. Using a comparison with (...) Aristotle’s account of recollection, especially in unfavorable circumstances, I describe indeterminate self-motion. Finally, I discuss implications for our understanding of Aristotle’s accounts of the faculties of the soul and incomplete animals. (shrink)

Freud tracked the psyche along the paths of sleep, following the “royal road” of dreams. For the ancient Greeks, too, the psyche was revealed in sleep, not through the semiotics of dreams but through the peculiar state of being we occupy while asleep. As a “borderland between living and not living”, sleep offered unique access to the psukhē, that element within the self unassimilable to waking consciousness. This paper examines how Greek philosophers theorized the sleep state and the somnolent psukhē, (...) focusing on Heraclitus, Plato, and Aristotle. Each of the three attempts to reclaim sleep for waking life and to join the sleeping soul to the philosophical self. But that attempt never fully succeeds. Instead sleep consistently emerges as a philosophical blindspot, a state that—unlike dreams—cannot be spoken by philosophy's logos nor fully illuminated by philosophical analysis. (shrink)

In a recent book, Substance and the Fundamentality of the Familiar, Ross Inman demonstrates the contemporary relevance of an Aristotelian approach to metaphysics and the philosophy of nature. Inman successfully applies the Aristotelian framework to a number of outstanding problems in metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of physics. Inman tackles some intriguing questions about the ontological status of proper parts, questions which constitute a central focus of ongoing debate and investigation.

In Nicomachean Ethics VII Aristotle describes akrasia as a disposition. Taking into account that it is a disposition, I argue that akrasia cannot be understood on an epistemological basis alone, i.e., it is not merely a problem of knowledge that the akratic person acts the ways he does, but rather one is akratic due to a certain kind of habituation, where the person is not able to activate the potential knowledge s/he possesses. To stress this point, I focus on the (...) gap between potential knowledge and its activation, whereby I argue that the distinction between potential and actual knowledge is at the center of the problem of akrasia. I suggest that to elaborate on this gap, we must go beyond the limits of Nicomachean Ethics to Metaphysics IX, where we find Aristotle’s discussion of the distinction between potentiality and actuality. I further analyze the gap between potential and actual knowledge by means of Aristotle’s discussion of practical syllogism, where I argue that akrasia is a result of a conflict in practical reasoning. I conclude my paper by stressing that for the akratic person the action is determined with respect to the conclusion of the practical syllogism, where the conclusion is produced by means of a ‘conflict’ between the universal opinion which is potential and the particular opinion which is appetitive. (shrink)

I explain what Aristotle means when, after puzzling about the matter of motion in incomplete animals (those without sight, smell, hearing), he suggests in De Anima III 11.433b31-434a5 that just as incomplete animals are moved indeterminately, desire and phantasia are present in those animals, but present indeterminately. I argue that self-motion and its directing faculties in incomplete animals differ in degree but not in kind from those of complete animals. I examine how an object of desire differs for an incomplete (...) animal. Using a comparison with Aristotle’s account of recollection, especially in unfavorable circumstances, I describe indeterminate self-motion. Finally, I discuss implications for our understanding of Aristotle’s accounts of the faculties of the soul and incomplete animals. (shrink)

In this essay I explore the resources Thomas Aquinas provides for enquiries concerning the psychological abilities of nonhuman animals. I first look to Aquinas’s account of divine, angelic, human, and nonhuman animal naming, to help us articulate the contours of a ‘critical anthropocentrism’ that aims to steer clear of the mistakes of a na¨ıve anthropocentrism and misconceived avowals to entirely eschew anthropocentrism. I then address the need for our critical anthropocentrism both to reject the mental-physical dichotomy endorsed by ‘folk psychology’ (...) and to articulate a more adequate ‘commonsense psychology’ that acknowledges most embodied animal behavior is observable psychological behavior. Next, I argue that we can develop Aquinas’s doctrine of estimation and conation to formulate an account of nonhuman animal action that more adequately characterizes the purposeful behaviors of nonhuman animals. To do so, we first need to recognize a wider range of nonhuman animal behaviors that are captured by Aquinas’s ‘estimative sense’, and that all of these behaviors are specified by a finite variety of particular goods confined to the animals’ environmental niches. But we also need to supplement Aquinas’s account of human and nonhuman animal agency by exploring the ontogeny and ecology of how humans and other animals become attuned to affordances within these different environmental niches. I argue that we should look to Aquinas’s account of nonhuman animal capacities in ST I-II 6-17 for subtle insights that can expand our understanding of how nonhuman animals engage in purposeful behavior by exercising analogous nonrational and imperfectly voluntary forms of intention, deliberation, choice, execution, and enjoyment. I conclude with an outline for how future enquiry can seek to explain the nonrational purposeful problem-solving competencies of chimps, canines, corvids, cetaceans, cephalopods, and other nonhuman animal species. (shrink)

This is the first collection of essays devoted specifically to the nature and significance of Aristotle's anthropological philosophy, covering the full range of his ethical, metaphysical and biological works. The book is organised into four parts, two of which deal with the metaphysics and biology of human nature and two of which discuss the anthropological foundations and implications of Aristotle's ethico-political works. The essay topics range from human nature and morality to friendship and politics, including original discussion and fresh perspectives (...) on rationalism, the intellect, perception, virtue, the faculty of speech and the differences and similarities between human and non-human animals. Wide-ranging and innovative, the volume will be highly relevant for readers studying Aristotle as well as for anyone working on either ancient or contemporary philosophical anthropology. (shrink)

This article, the second of a two-part essay, outlines a solution to certain tensions in Thomist philosophical anthropology concerning the interaction of the human person’s immaterial intellectual or noetic operations with the psychosomatic sensory operations that are constituted from the formal organization of the nervous system. Continuing with where the first part left off, I argue that Thomists should not be tempted by strong emergentist accounts of mental operations that act directly on the brain, but should maintain, with Aquinas, that (...) noetic operations directly interact with psychosomatic operations. I develop a Thomist account of noetic–psychosomatic interactions that expands upon the first part’s rapprochement between the new mechanist philosophy of neuroscience and psychology and hylomorphic animalism. I argue that noetic–psychosomatic interactions are best understood as analogous to the way diverse higher and lower order psychosomatic powers interact by actualizing, coordinating, and directing the operations of other psychosomatic powers. I draw on James Ross’s arguments for the immateriality of intellectual operations as realizing definite pure functions in order to elucidate the way noetic operations uniquely actualize, coordinate, and direct the psychosomatic operations they interact with. I conclude with a conjectural sketch of how this presentation of Thomist philosophical anthropology understands the noetic and psychosomatic deficits brought about by damage to the nervous system. (shrink)