Aristotle's Soul Analysis

In Phaedo, Socrates uses the soul and body to express the distinction between the forms and appearances. Socrates describes the soul as “divine, deathless, intelligible, uniform, indissoluble, always the same as itself, whereas the body is most like that which is human, mortal, multiform, unintelligible, soluble, and never consistently the same” (Phaedo 80b). Furthermore, Socrates believes there is a “future awaits men after death” (Phaedo 63c) because it might be “a relocating for the soul from here to another place” (Apology 40d). Socrates believes “the one aim of those who practice philosophy in the proper manner is to practice for dying and death” (Phaedo 64a) because philosophers are stuck “in a kind of prison” (Phaedo 62b) struggling to acquire knowledge.

In this essay it will be argued that the soul is mortal and does not survive the death of the body. As support, the following arguments from Lucretius will be examined: the “proof from the atomic structure of the soul,” the “proof from parallelism of mind and body,” the “proof from the sympatheia of mind and body,” and the “proof from the structural connection between mind and body.” The following arguments from Plato will be used as counterarguments against Lucretius: the “cyclical argument,” the “affinity argument,” the “argument from the form of life,” and the “recollection argument.” It will be shown that Plato’s premises lack validity and that Lucretius’

​The soul is our higher essence and actually creates our physical bodies and infuses us with life. Connecting with the soul is essential for healing and allows access to greater awareness, knowledge, creativity and connection to our Source of Creation, or

Socrates’ second argument is the Theory of Recollection. He explains that the soul plunges in the body and as it corrects itself, it loses clarity. Thus allowing experiences in the body to recollect the past memories. The active intellect can exist when the body ceases to be. It separates from soul and body and conjoins with the unmoved mover also known as God who moves the active-intellect by thinking. Socrates explains how the soul existed before birth, but not necessarily after death. He elaborates that all learning is a matter of recollecting what we already know, what our soul already knows. We forget much of our knowledge at birth, and can be made to recollect this knowledge through proper questioning, experiences, and sensations. The fact that we had such knowledge at birth, and could forget it, clearly proves that our souls had to have existed before we were born.

Aristotle has a different view on the make-up of the soul. In Aristotle discussion On the Soul he talks about the kinds of souls possessed by different living things such as plants, animals and, beings. Aristotle then goes on describing the substance that makes up the soul, the first is matter which is not this in its own right, the second is form which makes matter this and the third form is the compound of matter and form. Every living body is a substance and the soul is the actuality of the body. The soul

With this in mind Socrates and Glaucon agreed that the soul has at least two parts, the reasoning part and the desire part. Socrates gives the example of a thirsty man, he says that when the man is thirsty he would simply desire to drink, but the amount of how much he drinks or what kind of

These arguments show us that that Socrates thought that the soul is the source or essence of true knowledge. Even though Socrates does not directly answer the question of what the soul is we can see that he considers the soul is the source or essence of true

In his only extant work, the poem De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), Epicurean author Titus Lucretius Carus writes of the soul as being inseparable from the corporeal body. This view, although controversial in its opposition to the traditional concept of a discrete, immortal soul, is nevertheless more than a mere novelty. The argument that Lucretius makes for the soul being an emergent property of interactions between physical particles is in fact more compelling and well-supported now than Lucretius himself would have ever imagined.

explains his belief that the “soul exists before, and survives the body”. Plato 's beliefs of

Aristotle presents a short analysis of the rational part of the soul, dividing it into two parts, a part that uses reason and a part that obeys reason. He sees life as supported by activity and not just the capacity to do something.

Plato has roused many readers with the work of a great philosopher by the name of Socrates. Through Plato, Socrates lived on generations after his time. A topic of Socrates that many will continue to discuss is the idea of “an immortal soul”. Although there are various works and dialogues about this topic it is found to be best explained in The Phaedo. It is fair to say that the mind may wonder when one dies what exactly happens to the beloved soul, the giver of life often thought of as the very essence of life does it live on beyond the body, or does it die with it? Does the soul have knowledge of the past if it really does live on?

It is also important to say that he also believes the soul is the form of the body in part, because the soul is the organization of the parts the body, the body is matter and it or soul is the form-the actual living body. To reiterate this point Aristotle offers us the example of a corpse and a bronze or wooden hand and states that these are not forms as they “lack the potentiality to perform the function of a hand”.7this would also suggest that once we are dead we undergo a material change which stops function and makes us akin to a statue. Aristotle then goes on to discuss matter which he says is “the matter that is the subject necessarily has a certain sort of nature....fire has a hot and light nature”8. He states that matter is what earlier philosophers focused on and it was how they explained the order of the world. Aristotle however does not believe that this is the way in which we should study nature, he believes we should ask what gives each natural substance its characteristic and we should look at “how each thing has naturally come to be, rather than how it is...then state their causes”9. Therefore he concludes that a prior observational investigation is best and that we should study the form.

As Plato advocates that soul belongs to different order from body, so it cannot be set alongside the body as homogeneous entity. The soul’s penchant is towards another world. It becomes evident, why the senses are envisaged, not as windows but as bars, since so far as the physical nature of man is concerned it is not just a matter of noting, ontologically, the finite character of its existence, but rather one making an ethical and religious value-judgment on this earthly life form the viewpoint of higher destiny. Only when the soul has undergone an inner transformation and been duly prepared for this it can looks at the body in a fresh light, as it were, and so discover as meaningful affinity between soul and body, which serves to orientate man towards the higher reality.

body, the mind and the soul. The body is the physical part of the body

The human person is made up of two components the body and the soul. I believe that the relationship between the body and the soul are united as one. The human person resides in both the body and the soul equally. A philosopher who believes in the theory of the body and soul together, creating the human person is Aristotle. There are two elements of the soul, ration and irrational. The rational element is composed of the theoretical reason and practical reason. The irrational element is compose of vegetative, appetites, and desires. The body and soul interrelate by the soul acting as a container for the body, therefore together their body and soul become the entire human person. An analogy to compart the relationship of the body and soul