Summary |
One of the most disputed recent questions on this area concerns how Aristotle's conception of the soul relates to contemporary philosophy of mind. Is Aristotle a precursor of functionalism and a committed naturalist? Does his conception of soul rest on his antiquated and indefensible physics? Is Aristotle, instead, a sort of dualist? Is his position only fully articulable in terms of his own metaphysics of potentiality and actuality, matter and form? Another area of discussion has been whether Aristotle's understanding of soul and body fits with his general account of form and matter, given that the matter of the living thing, the body, does not seem able to persist in the way that the matter of other hylomorphic compounds persists. A related debate concerns whether we should think that the soul is the form of "an organic body" because the bodies of living things have parts that serve as tools or instruments or because the body as a whole is an instrument of the soul. Further important areas of research in this category include how Aristotle's general account of the soul relates to his specific accounts of soul and whether Aristotle thinks that any kind of soul could be separable from its body. |