Some observations on the problem of the union of body and soul in Aristotle’s De Anima
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Abstract
If soul and body are considered as two entities of different nature, the problem of their union arises. Aristotle attempts to solve this problem applying his distinction between matter and form to the living body; the soul would be the form that gives rise to the substance that is the material body. Nevertheless, there is a difficulty when dealing with the human soul: it seems, by observing its operations, that the human soul has some independence from matter. This would bring Aristotle closer to a the dualist (platonist) position that he was trying to refute. In this paper we propose that, even though Aristotle is not able to solve the problem of the soul-body union in the case of human beings, his philosophy takes charge of the observable data without reducing them to his theory, and that constitutes progress in understanding the problem.
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