The Nature of Soul: The Property-Thing

Abstract

The evidence for the attributivist nature of form or soul is far from trivial, which helps explain attributivism’s current domination of the scholarship. Prominent among this evidence is Aristotle’s tendency to speak about form as a ‘predicate’ of its material ‘subject’, and especially impressive in this respect are his opening remarks on his own view of the nature of soul in De Anima 2.1, in which he speaks about soul as if it were a predicate of its material or bodily ‘subject’ (412^a16–19). The ‘predicative’ nature of form and its dependence upon its subject contribute to the impression that the asymmetry between matter and form, which Aristotle stresses in Metaphysics Z. 17, amounts to a distinction in type, which is just what attributivism would call for in its characterization of form as a property. Moreover, there is the strongest evidence for attributivism, which it is unlikely that substantialism will ever explain away in its own favor, and thus for good reason substantialists tend to ignore this evidence or at least they fail to stress it. This evidence is Aristotle’s own definition of soul as the ‘first actuality’ of a body possessed of organs, which he defines in terms redolent of dispositionalism. Aristotle presents the definition, not as an aside in an insignificant spot, but formally and with considerable elaboration in De Anima 2.1, at the inauguration of the exposition of his own theory of the soul (412^a21–^b16). Furthermore, the argument for the subjecthood of form, which takes form to be the subject of the sorts of properties that belong to the composite substance, and which is an important feature of the substantialist position as it is usually prosecuted, turns out to be fairly weak upon scrutiny, and, in particular, seems to be faced with the difficult hurdle of the ‘celebrated Rylean passage’ of De Anima 1.4, which in general favors attributivism.