Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Alexander of Aphrodisias

« possessing life, or, more shortly, of an organic body, and regards the soul of a living creature as its form.

But it iscontroversial how this is to be understood.

Some have interpreted Aristotle's notion of soul as a functionalist one;but this view has been criticized on the grounds that it does not do justice to the close connection in Aristotlebetween the performance of a given function and the particular arrangement needed for it.

This close connectionbetween form and matter in Aristotle's theory of them has caused major difficulties for interpreters, because it isnot clear how soul and body can be logically distinguished, if a lifeless hand or eye is a hand or eye only in name,and only an already living, 'ensouled' body is to count as an organic body.

It seems that either body must bedefined in terms of soul, which raises the question whether there is any level at which the matter of a living body isspecifiable without reference to its soul, or else that soul must be accounted for in terms of the arrangement of thebody and its parts.

Interpreters of Aristotle have favoured the former approach.

Aristotle himself (in On the Soul I 4) rejects - though with some hesitation - the notion that soul can be a 'harmony' or arrangement of the bodilyelements, partly because such an arrangement cannot itself be a cause of movement as the soul is.

However,Alexander not only defines the soul as the product of the mixture of the bodily elements ( On the Soul 24.21-3 ), apparently following Andronicus, but sets out his exposition of the nature of soul by starting with the simple bodies,earth, air, fire and water, and working upwards through progressively more elaborate compounds until he arrives atliving creatures and finally at human beings.

It is therefore hardly surprising that his account of the soul has oftenbeen criticized as materialist, reductivist and un-Aristotelian.

However, these criticisms may to some extent reflectthe critics' own standpoints, and their own interpretations of Aristotle.

It is scarcely un-Aristotelian to suggest thata given form requires a given arrangement of given types of matter, and Alexander's order of exposition need notindicate that he regards more complex forms as posterior to less complex ones so far as explanatory or ontologicaldependence is concerned.

Indeed he derives the substantiality of the form-matter composite from that of the formand the matter (6.2-4), and insists that it is the form of each thing that determines its nature (7.4-8).

Moreover,texts attributed to Alexander insist that form is not in matter, or soul in body, in the way that a quality can be in asubstrate, because it is by the form and the soul that the matter and the body are characterized in the first place(Quaestiones I 8, 17, 26; Mantissa 119-22.) It is true that Alexander's treatment of soul excludes any individual immortality; indeed this was his chief source of popularity in the Renaissance.

But Aristotle's view itself arguablyencounters difficulties where personal immortality is concerned.

Attribution to Aristotle, in his mature period, ofbelief in personal immortality turns on interpretation of his remarks concerning intellect, and especially the so-called'active intellect' of his own On the Soul III.5.

Alexander, however, identifies the active intellect not with an element peculiar to the soul of each individual but with god, the 'unmoved mover' of Metaphysics XII.

The theory of intellect is discussed both in Alexander's On the Soul and in a section of the Mantissa which is of doubtful authenticity and seems itself to be a combination of several different texts, but which circulated independently in the Middle Agesfirst in Arabic translation and then in Latin, and was more influential than Alexander's On the Soul itself.

Common to both works is the view that the individual human's intellect at birth is purely potential; it is therefore referred to as'material intellect', by analogy with the potentiality of matter in the ordinary sense of the latter term.

Since,however, it must be receptive to all forms, it has no nature of its own (see Aristotle, On the Soul III 4, 429b10-22); and indeed in On the Soul its state at birth is likened not so much to a blank writing-tablet (Aristotle, On the Soul III 4, 429a31-) as to the blankness of the tablet (84.24-7).

As a person grows to adulthood the 'material' intellectdevelops, by the acquisition of concepts through the abstraction of matter from the forms in substances composedof form and matter, until it becomes intellect 'in disposition' ( en hexei , later Latinized as in habitu ), capable of independent thought.

What is less clear is the part which the active intellect is supposed to play in this process.Alexander's On the Soul , characteristically, simply presents two arguments that the unmoved mover, as pure self- thinking intellect and intelligible in its own right, is responsible for our thinking too, without explaining veryadequately how this comes about.

First, as supremely intelligible it must be the cause of other things' intelligibility (88.24-89.8 ) - an argument which sounds more Platonist than Aristotelian, though it is not indeed being used here to establish the existence of intelligible pure form.

And second, it is the cause of being for all other things, and thus for all the objects of intellect ( 89.9-19 ).

This is probably to be understood in terms of the movement of the heavens, caused by the unmoved mover, being the cause of sublunary coming-to-be (see §4); but as anexplanation of how our intellects become able to think it scarcely seems adequate.

In the short text On Intellect (107.31-4, 108.19-22), on the other hand, the active intellect appears to act directly upon our intellect, apparentlyby providing it with a paradigm of pure form and thus enabling it to separate other, 'enmattered' forms from thematter in which they are embodied - which apparently has the rather implausible implication that we mustapprehend god, in order to possess this paradigm, before we can think of anything else in general terms.

In On the Soul 90.11- 20 it is argued that, since intellect is identical with its object at any given time, immortality can be present in us when we think of god; but it is not our own 'material' intellect that then becomes immortal.

This is theonly immortality open to us as individuals (but see below on the eternity of species).

On Intellect (whether itself by Alexander or not) indicates that Alexander's treatment of the topic built upon earlier Peripatetic discussions, andthat the identification of the active intellect with god rather than with an element in the individual soul had alreadybeen connected with Aristotle's reference to 'intellect from outside' ( Generation of Animals II 3 736b27-).

But that in fact relates to the origin of intellect in the context of the generation of individual human beings, with no explicitidentification of the source from which such intellect comes, and no apparent reference to its entering into usthrough acts of intellectual apprehension, as in Alexander's view.

3 Universals Aristotle rejects the Platonist view that forms of material objects can exist even in the absence of any material instances, and holds that the form ofhuman being exists only in individual human beings and, in a different way, in the minds that think of them.

What ismuch less clear is Aristotle's view of the ontological status of such forms, and in particular whether they are to beregarded as individual or universal.

Alexander regards universals as posterior to individuals.

He has therefore beencriticized for adopting an un-Aristotelian nominalism; but his position is in fact more subtle.

If we accept theevidence of the Quaestiones (I 3), Alexander draws a distinction between the nature, as such, of a species, and that nature as a universal.

Definition is of what is common to the members of a species, as opposed to the. »