Abstract
Aristotle saw nutrition as the most fundamental life activity, the ability to turn not-self into self. That activity undergirds and supports all the others. He spoke concretely of three souls, identified by their life activities. Vegetables operate through nutrition and reproduction. They consume resources and have offspring. Animals interact with their environment through sensation and locomotion. They have the vegetable activities but they also sense and respond to stimuli. Finally, humans reason. Aristotle provides both etiological and a physiological accounts of vegetable souls. The etiological account can be usefully compared to evolution by natural selection. The physiological account, invoking vital heat, does not fit well with modern science. Nor do the concepts of form necessary to animal and rational souls.
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Notes
- 1.
In Latin, anima also suggests breathing.
- 2.
Hendrik Lorenz (2009) discusses whether this entails cognition of some sort in animals or even plants. It clearly does not entail reason, self-consciousness, or abstract thought, but it may require associating means and ends, if only to the extent that the living thing connects an activity with pleasure prospectively.
- 3.
“thinking” here relates to nous and “calculation” to logos .
- 4.
Aristotle ’s souls are physical, obeying the same rules as tangible things. They are not material, but can only be in-action and in-fulfillment in the context of a material body.
References
Freudenthal, Gad. Aristotle’s Theory of Material Substance: Heat and Pneuma, Form and Soul. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Lorenz, Hendrik. The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Lorenz, Hendrik. “Ancient Theories of Soul.” In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Summer 2009 ed. Stanford University, 1997–. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2009/entries/ancient-soul/.
Mix, Lucas J. “Nested Explanation in Aristotle and Mayr.” Synthese 193, no. 6 (2016): 1817–1832.
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Mix, L.J. (2018). Life in Action: Nutritive Souls in Aristotle. In: Life Concepts from Aristotle to Darwin. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96047-0_5
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