Abstract

I am interested in placing Aristotle’s discussion of the soul in De Anima in historical context, arguing that the philosophical terrain within which he developed his own theory is not radically different from that of our own time. As we can gather from historical overview of Book I, Aristotle faces essentially the same challenges and choices in the field of philosophical psychology as the moderns do. As such, he stands firmly within the mainstream philosophical development, and presents a genuine alternative to the dominant theories of mind. I defend this thesis against a misrepresentation of Aristotle’s view which suggests that the ‘traditional’ views on the nature of mind are not even intelligible given Aristotle’s peculiar presuppositions and his limited stock of concepts. This, if true, would make Aristotle’s psychology fully ‘superseded’ by later developments, in the same manner as his physics was ‘superseded’ by the subsequent progress in natural sciences. Against this I argue that the central notions of De Anima , when properly understood, are quite ‘commensurable’ with any modern post-Cartesian theory