Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Preface
- Introduction
- I Biology and philosophy: an overview
- II Definition and demonstration: theory and practice
- III Teleology and necessity in nature
- IV Metaphysical themes
- 11 Aristotle's biology was not essentialist
- 12 Logical difference and biological difference: the unity of Aristotle's thought
- 13 Kinds, forms of kinds, and the more and the less in Aristotle's biology
- 14 Animals and other beings in Aristotle
- 15 Aristotle on bodies, matter, and potentiality
- 16 Aristotle on the place of mind in nature
- List of works cited
- Index locorum
- General index
16 - Aristotle on the place of mind in nature
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 June 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Preface
- Introduction
- I Biology and philosophy: an overview
- II Definition and demonstration: theory and practice
- III Teleology and necessity in nature
- IV Metaphysical themes
- 11 Aristotle's biology was not essentialist
- 12 Logical difference and biological difference: the unity of Aristotle's thought
- 13 Kinds, forms of kinds, and the more and the less in Aristotle's biology
- 14 Animals and other beings in Aristotle
- 15 Aristotle on bodies, matter, and potentiality
- 16 Aristotle on the place of mind in nature
- List of works cited
- Index locorum
- General index
Summary
In the last chapter of her book Physicalism K. V. Wilkes writes:
Aristotle (and all Greek philosophers before him) lacked the concept of ‘a mind’, and would not have wanted it had it been explained to them; lacking any such notion, they lacked, too, the concept of ‘the mental’; and hence they had no mind–body problem. Within Aristotle's psychology the relation of the mental to the physical cannot even be posed.
(1978: 115)This view is developed also by D. W. Hamlyn in the introduction to his Aristotle's De Anima (1968): it certainly has the charm of paradox. The common Greek word nous appears to express our concept of a mind. Aristotle speaks of nous as ‘part of the soul’ and says it differs from other parts in three ways: it is not the concern of the natural scientist, it comes in ‘from outside’, and it is ‘separable’ from the body. If that does not give him a mind–body problem, what would? The fact is that while Aristotle's account of psychological concepts generally, his doctrine that soul and body are related as form to matter or actuality to possibility, is attractively undualistic, when he comes to nous dualism seems to seep back. J. L. Ackrill in Aristotle the Philosopher remarks:
The idea of a pure intellect literally separable from the body is difficult to understand, and difficult to reconcile with the rest of Aristotle's philosophy.
(1981a: 62)- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Philosophical Issues in Aristotle's Biology , pp. 408 - 423Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1987
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