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Essay on Compare and Contrast Plato's and Aristotle's Views about the Human Soul
Plato's conception of the soul and of its relation to the body develops far beyond what he wrote in the Phaedo. The same is true of his notions about aretê (the "human excellence" which is often translated by that tired term "virtue"), freedom, and eudaemonia, "happiness." This should not come as a surprise. For Plato was intelligent enough to realize that any conception we entertain about human excellence and that fulfillment human beings hope to attain by achieving both freedom and happiness must remain coherent with, and follow from, our conception of the components and structure of the human being. It would be silly to assign any being a telos, a purposed end, unless that being were equipped with the resources, and suitably structured, to attain that end. (George F. Dole, 1984)
It was this natural connection that led Socrates to insert, not once but twice, a series of reflections on what that conception of the soul implied about the four virtues that the Greeks considered as adding up to the fullness of human aretê. And those same reflections tell us much of what Plato, at that stage of his development, meant by freedom and happiness.
Aristotle seems to have been as powerfully struck as Plato was by the impressive powers exhibited by the human mind. So, he repeatedly exempts "mind" from the conclusions he draws concerning the human "soul." True enough, he has jettisoned Plato's theory of Ideals and with it his explanation of mental learning as "remembering"; our minds, he claimed, are capable of drawing our ideas of "essences" by "abstracting" those essences from the realities presented to our sense experience...............
