On the Soul
Peri Psyches
The soul is not a separate substance trapped in the body but the form and actuality of a naturally organized living body, so asking whether soul and body are one is as misguided as asking whether wax and its shape are one.
- soul as the form and actuality of the body
- rejection of the soul as a separate substance
- the hierarchy of nutritive, perceptual, rational soul
- perception as receiving form without matter
- the disputed 'active intellect'
In On the Soul, Aristotle rejects both the Platonic picture of the soul as a distinct substance only accidentally attached to the body and any purely materialist reduction of soul to bodily matter, defining the soul instead as the form, or first actuality, of a natural body with the potential for life. He distinguishes nutritive, perceptual, and rational capacities as a hierarchy shared to different degrees by plants, animals, and humans, and gives an influential account of sense perception as the reception of a sensible form without its matter. The treatise's brief, notoriously obscure discussion of an 'active intellect,' possibly immortal, generated centuries of conflicting interpretation among Islamic, Jewish, and Christian commentators.
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