Aristotle’s views on the Soul
by Tatiana Velitchkov © 2009

There have been many philosophers in the last several centuries. Among the earlier ones was Aristotle. He was a Greek philosopher and a student of Plato who was also an earlier philosopher. Aristotle presented many views on different things. One of them was that of the soul. Aristotle defines the soul as the core of a person’s living but argues that it has an entirely separate existence.

In his view the activity is the soul of a living thing, for example, an eye’s soul would be sight. Again if a pen had a life of its own its soul would be writing, because the essence of the pen is to write and the eye is sight. According to Aristotle the soul is an actuality of the body. In other words the soul cannot continue living when the body dies, what other philosophers describe as ghostly characters of the body.

This is just like the pen the writing stops when the pen is destroyed. The soul cannot be immortal so when the body dies so does the soul. However, Aristotle writes that the soul does not remember after death. It is unclear on to what extent he believed the soul was separate to the body. In his De Anima, one of his many works, he makes it clear that he believes the intellectual part of the soul can be separable from the body and is eternal.

This makes it a bit confusing on whether the soul is part of the body or separate, or is it some part of the soul that is separable. Many philosophers are debating on the writings of the De Anima, and on the views of Aristotle on the immortality of the soul. It is worth noting that Aquinas interpreted these remarks as reasonable, logically argued and convincing. Aristotle’s view on the afterlife is somehow comparable to the Christian than it would seem at initial glance.

Aristotle separated the intellectual sense into the “calculative” or “deliberative” or ‘theoretical’ or ‘scientific’. The first part is art meaning outside man hence the result of his activity. The other part is prudence that is the activity-referred to as the “art” of doing. It is greatly articulated in politics. Prudence concerns what men are supposed to do with the future. The part of scientific understanding is the top activity of the faculty and of man himself since it’s man’s intellectual ability that separates him from other creatures.