Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy

276
Christopher Shields
P 5 : In the case of soul-body compounds, the entelecheia is the soul.
C 3 : Hence, in the case of soul-body compounds, the compound is a unity
by being suitably related to the soul.
P 4 : If the compound is a unity by being suitably related to the soul as its
source of unity, then it is not necessary to ask whether the soul and
body are one.
C: Hence, it is not necessary to ask whether the soul and body are one.
There is nothing amiss or confused in the question of soul-body unity,
and there is no mistake, categorial or otherwise, betrayed in its formulation.
It is not necessary to ask the question of whether soul and body
are one, for we have its answer available to us.
This answer is given, as this reconstruction makes explicit, in terms
of Aristotle’s appeals to homonymy and the notion of the soul’s being
an entelecheia. The interim conclusions simply trace the chain of inferences
upon which the compressed remarks in this passage rely. According
to this responsive interpretation, then, we have no need to ask
whether the soul and body are one, because we have our answer at
the ready: the compound is one as a non-core homonym, depending,
in the manner of all non-core homonyms, on its core source, or archÞ,
in this instance, the soul, which is its entelecheia.
Of course, a complete appraisal of this argument would require a full
specification of a number of as-yet unexplicated notions, not least the
notion of being ‘suitably related’ to a core. As I have argued elsewhere,
the relevant notion of suitability is to be given in terms of Aristotle’s
four-causal explanatory schema, 17 and here we can only observe that
the soul as entelecheia fits that schema precisely, because, as we have
seen Aristotle insisting, it is the formal, final, and efficient cause of
the compound (de An. 415b8 –14; cf. PA 467b12–25; Ph. 255a6 –
10). For present purposes, it matters most that this version of the responsive
interpretation frankly accepts the soul as prior to the compound in
terms of unity: it is the unity of the soul, as the entelecheia of the compound
which grounds and explains the unity of the compound, and not
the other way around. The soul is, in this respect at least, prior.
17 See Shields 1999, 110 – 122.