Abstract

This dissertation is an attempt to understand Aristotle's De Anima as a unified whole--a unity, I argue, which is only as problematic as is the unity of the soul of which it speaks. By focusing on Aristotle's account of the faculties of sight and touch, and the tension between these two powers by which the activity of knowledge has been metaphorically understood throughout much of the history of philosophy, I believe I have come close to capturing the essence of what Aristotle means by entelecheia. The problem of soul understood as an entelecheia amounts to the problem, as it has been expressed by Nietzsche, of "How One Becomes What One Is." For Aristotle, I try to show, becoming what one is already, as a potentiality, is an activity of becoming not a knower but rather a student, or an activity that involves learning how to learn