On the Soul
A treatise by Aristotle examining the soul as the principle of life, its faculties, and its relation to living bodies.
Aristotle: An ancient Greek philosopher whose works shaped logic, natural science, ethics, and metaphysics. He develops the treatise’s account of soul through his broader philosophy of nature and form.
Nutritive soul: The soul capacity for nourishment, growth, and reproduction, shared by plants and other living things. It is the most basic faculty in Aristotle’s hierarchy of life.
Parva Naturalia: A collection of Aristotle’s shorter works on biological and psychological topics. These works continue investigations of perception, memory, sleep, and related capacities.
Aristotelian psychology: Aristotle’s study of living beings through their capacities for nutrition, perception, thought, and movement. On the Soul is its foundational systematic treatment.
Hylomorphism: The view that physical things consist of matter organized by form. It explains why Aristotle treats soul as a living body’s form, not a separate occupant.
Perception: The capacity to receive sensible forms through the senses without receiving their matter. Aristotle uses perception to explain how animals register sensible qualities.
Plato’s theory of the soul: Plato’s account of the soul as distinct from the body and capable of survival after death. Aristotle rejects treating soul simply as a separable occupant of the body.
Mind-body problem: The philosophical problem of how mental phenomena relate to bodily processes. The treatise’s account of soul as a body’s form offers a distinctive alternative to substance dualism.
Nature (philosophy): The principle of change and rest belonging to things in their own right. The treatise studies soul as the source of characteristic activities in natural living things.
Imagination: A faculty that produces or retains mental appearances, often when the sensed object is absent. It mediates between perception and thought in Aristotle’s account of animal cognition.