Nicola asked:

Please could you tell me Aristotle's and Plato's view on the soul. Could you please tell me the main
differences that they had. Also if possible any quotes from either of them on this topic.

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Since there doesn't seem to be a material difference between an organism in the last moments of its
life and the organism's newly dead body, Plato (and other philosophers) have claimed that the soul is
an immaterialcomponent of an organism. Since only material things are observed to be subject to
dissolution, Plato took the soul's immateriality as grounds for its immortality. Immortality to Plato is the
soul's chief characteristic.

While in the ApologySocrates had been portrayed as agnostic on the immortality of the soul, in the
Phaedohe is convinced of it, and the dialogue is as a whole a sustained argument for that claim.

Further arguments for the immortality of the soul can be found in RepublicBook 10 and in the
Phaedrus,but in those dialogues there is also a more complex view of what the soul is. Whereas the
early dialogues had been content with a simple opposition between soul and body, in RepublicBook
4 the soul itself is divided into three 'parts', which roughly correspond to reason, emotion, and desire,
of which reason as the superior quality is like a charioteer to control the inferior qualities emotion and
desire. An explicit motive for this division is to allow for conflict within the soul, and one consequence
of this is that Plato is no longer tempted by the Socratic claim that all virtue is knowledge, and its
associated paradoxes. He does retain the early view that virtue is a condition of the soul, but wisdom
is now viewed as a virtue of the reasoning part, whereas courage is a virtue of the spirited part, and
justice is explained as a suitable 'harmony' between all three parts. Another consequence of the
threefold division of the soul is that Plato seems to have become uncertain how much of the soul is
immortal. (Republic 10, 611-12 is deliberately evasive; Phaedrus245-9 clearly claims that the team
of all three parts is immortal; Timaeus69-72 is equally clear in its claim that only the reasoning part is
immortal.) Plato thinks of the immortal soul as subject to reincarnation from one life to another. Those
who live virtuous lives will be somehow rewarded, but the detail differs from one treatment to another.

Further Plato argued that knowledge could have been acquired only by our immortal souls'
acquaintance with the Forms before our birth and not through sense-experience. 'Learning' is
therefore anamnesis.As a (little convincing) proof, in Meno,Socrates elicits geometrical knowledge
from a slave-boy (84a — 85).

In contrast to Plato's partly mythical attempt, Aristotle approached the concept of the soul from an
essentially scientificperspective, employing elements of biology and metaphysics that encompassed
everything from the concepts of substance, form, and matter, to those of potentiality and actuality.

In On the Soul(De Anima) Book II,1 Aristotle describes the soul as the first actuality (entelecheia) of
a natural body that has life potentiality (412a) and as the cause and the first principle of the living
body (415b). Metaphysicians before Aristotle discussed the soul abstractly without any regard to the
bodily environment, which, Aristotle believes, was a mistake.

In characterizing the soul and body in these ways, Aristotle applies the concept of hylemorphism,a
framework which underlies virtually all of his theorizing.

According to Aristotle the soul is the efficientcause (it initiates change and movement), the final
cause (as the body's goal) and the formalcause (as the organizing principle) at the same time.

There are three 'kinds' of souls, which correspond with the stages of biological development: the
vegetative soul of plants, the sensitive souls of animals and the rational soul of humans, which adds
to all the powers of the 'lower' souls the ability to reason theoretically (414a, b). Therefore, according
to Aristotle, the human soul is a reward based on the sum total of our biological nature and our
unique capacities as humans to think and feel.

Summary and Comparison:

Neither Plato nor Aristotle thought that only humans had souls: Aristotle ascribed souls to animals
and plants since they all exhibited some living functions. Unlike Plato, Aristotle denied the
transmigration of souls from one species to another after death. He was also more skeptical about
whether souls could exist without a body. In contrast to Plato, Aristotle thought of the soul not so
much as an entity, but more as a life principle — the aspect of the person that provides the powers or
attributes characteristic of the human being. While Plato's soul sees the Forms in an immaterial world
(a priori), Aristotle's soul has capacity to abstract the stable and universal nature of material things (a
posteriori).

Simone Klein