Abstract
Abstract This article considers whether and how there can be for Aristotle a genuine science of ‘pure’ psychology, of the soul as such, which amounts to considering whether Aristotle’s model of science in the Posterior Analytics is applicable to the de Anima.
Highlights
“Only the parts of the form are parts of the formula, and this is a formula of what is universal”
As the opening chapters of Posterior Analytics make clear, well-founded sciences proceed from necessarily true, basic, explanatory first principles, archai, and deduce from them, as necessarily consequent theorems, propositions concerning the per se attributes of the items whose essential properties the axioms encode
This leaves open the possibility of there being a kind of ‘pure’ psychology, or science of the soul, consisting in the investigation of the relations that hold between types of functional capacity, by contrast with the ‘applied’ psychology, which is a part of physics
Summary
Aristotle sets great store by the investigation into the soul, or psuchê. At the beginning of de Anima, his detailed philosophical treatment of the subject, he writes: We suppose that knowledge (eidêsis) is one of the fine and honorable things; and that one type of it is better than another in view of its exactness (akribeia), or because it has better and more wonderful objects; and on both of these grounds we may reasonably place knowledge of the soul among the primary types of knowledge. It is rendered difficult by the extreme generality of the investigation, and the large number of fundamental questions that need to be resolved before we can even get started Not least among these are those concerning the relationship of the various forms of life to one another, and how these relationships should structure our account of the basic, explanatory properties at issue (most people have concentrated on the human soul, and ignored these crucial issues: de Anima 1.1, 402b3-8). This in turn casts some light on the relation between super- and subordinate sciences, and the ‘mixed sciences’, physical sciences which borrow some of their axioms from the formal, abstract sciences of arithmetic and geometry
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