Past event
How Aristotle Saves Plato's Soul: Common and Proper Pathē in the Philebus and De Anima Jason Carter (St Andrews)
This is a School of Classics Event.
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**Abstract**
In the Philebus, Socrates argues that an affection (πάθος) of a living being may be proper (ἴδιον) to the soul, proper to the body, or shared in common (κοινόν) by both. Aristotle seems coopt this categorization for his own investigation of the soul's affections in De Anima book I. However, Aristotle's classifications of the affections are strikingly different from those of Socrates in the Philebus. There, Socrates argues that all the affections of living beings are proper to the soul, apart from the common affections of perception and bodily desire. In contrast, Aristotle argues that all the affections of living being are constituted jointly with the body, with the possible exception of thought (νοῦς).
Jason will argue that Aristotle's divergence from the Philebus is due to the fact that its classification of the common affections does not take into account the way that the body is moved when the soul experiences psychological affections other than perception and bodily desire. However, despite this major disagreement, he will argue that Aristotle nevertheless accepts one of the most controversial claims of the Philebus, which is that the affection of thought, while proper to the soul and not shared in common with the body, is also common to divine thought. Aristotle's adoption of this Phileban thesis, Jason argues, puts him in agreement with Plato in affirming that human souls continue to exist after death, as is suggested in De Anima 3.5. The oddity of Aristotle's view, however, is that it implies that human souls will not continue to exist as personal beings, as in Plato, but as beings whose contemplative activities merge into the contemplative activity of divine thought.
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