Aristotle on the Individuality of Self

Aristotle undeniably diverged from Plato in his view of what a human being most truly and fundamentally is. Plato, at least in many of his dialogues, held that the true self of human beings is the reason or the intellect that constitutes their soul and that is separable from their body. Aristotle, for his part, insisted that the human being is a composite of body and soul and that the soul cannot be separated from the body. Aristotle’s philosophy of self was constructed in terms of hylomorphism in which the soul of a human being is the form or the structure of the human body or the human matter, i.e., the functional organization in virtue of which human beings are able to perform their characteristic activities of life, including growth, nutrition, reproduction, perception, imagination, desire, and thinking.