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from Aristotle, the other from several Greek materialists, who became known
collectively as the atomists.
Aristotelianism
According to Aristotle (384-322 b.c.e.) the soul has parts, which account for its
various functions. Early in his career, Aristotle seems to have followed Plato in
assuming that the part of the soul that accounts for its ability to think rationally,
which he called nous, i s immortal.
13
Later, in De anima (On the life-force, or On
the soul) and elsewhere, his statements about the persistence of nous
are enig-
matic. Nevertheless, it is surely true that unlike Plato in the Phaedo,
Aristotle’s
main theoretical concern with the soul had little to do with survival of bodily
death. Neither did he follow Plato in developing a normative theory of morality
based on self-interest. Rather, so far as the soul is concerned, Aristotle was preoc-
cupied with two other problems: the place of humans in the larger scheme of
things and the soul’s relationship to the body.
As we have seen, in Plato’s view there was one main division in reality, that
between the material and visible, on the one hand, and the “immaterial” and
invisible, on the other. The former became real by “participating” in the latter.
The more it participated, the more real it was. Plato’s dualism is often called a
two-worlds view. According to Aristotle, though with some exceptions—such as
“the Unmoved Mover,” which is responsible for moving the planets—there is
only one world, every item of which is a union of matter and form, and there-
fore, material. Even so, in his view, not all material objects are equally real.
There is a gradation of being, at the lowest end of which is inorganic matter and
at the highest the Unmoved Mover. Vegetable life is above inorganic matter;
nonreasoning animals are above vegetable life; and humans are above nonrea-
soning animals. Aristotle thought of the Unmoved Mover as pure form. Later
generations of Christian theologians cast it in the role of God.
In Aristotle’s view, except for inorganic matter, everything has a psyche, or
soul, which is its vital principle—that is, what it is about it that accounts for its
being alive. Most of the soul is inseparable from the body that it informs. Appar-
ently the soul’s rational part—nous—is separable, although some scholars dis-
pute whether Aristotle really held this view. On the assumption that Aristotle
did hold it, it is not clear whether it was also part of his view that nous can retain
personal
individuality when it is separate from a body or whether nous
is one
entity, which is on loan to all individual humans while they are engaged in ratio-
nal thinking and hence not something that belongs specifically to any individual