[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Is The Soul Immortal
A satisfactory exegesis of Aristotle's philosophy of soul must pay close attention to De Anima 2.1, where he says that he is trying to determine what is the soul and what is the most common account of the soul. By "most common account", he evidently means the most inclusive account, an account of what souls of all kinds have in common. lthough his discussion is very abstract, we may reasonably expect it to set parameters of a defensible interpretation. This account of the soul has two interrelated stages: in the first the soul is an actualization, and in the second it is an essence.
The first stage begins with the category of substance, which is distinguished into three types:
- matter, which is intrinsically or in itself not a this
- shape or form, through which we call something a this; and
- the composite of matter and form.
This analysis is immediately related to the distinction between actualization and potentiality: "Matter is potentiality and form is actualization." (Aristotle, 1987) Actuality has two levels. This is briefly explained in De Anima 2.1 by an analogy with knowledge, which is developed more fully in De Anima 2.5.417a21-b2: “Human beings are knowers in the potential sense because they are the sort of beings who have knowledge. They are knowers at the first level of actuality when they have knowledge--for example, the grammatical knowledge that subject and verb should agree in number. They are knowers at the second level of actualization when they are actually aware of or using this knowledge--for example, in correcting the sentence, "They is going." (Aristotle, 1987)
Aristotle next remarks that bodies are especially believed to be substances, especially natural bodies, for these are principles of other bodies. This recalls the account of nature in Physics 2.1, which distinguishes between things that exist by nature...............
