Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy

The priority of soul in Aristotle’s De anima: Mistaking categories? 285
closed. 27 This is indeed a sort of problem which does not arise for Aristotle.
28
V. Category mistakes in and out of Aristotle
Is the Aristotelian thought that the soul is prior to the body in these
ways laudable or lamentable? 29 If the general view developed thus far
is correct even in outline, then Aristotle’s commitment to the priority
of soul puts him at variance with modern-day attempts to explain psychic
activity in terms of antecedently given and independently specifiable
physical states. In his view, any such attempt would be akin to
someone endeavoring to explain the craft of carpentry by suggesting
that a non-craftsman had stumbled upon a box of ready-made saws,
hammers, awls, and levels only then to form the bright idea that he
might use them to build a table. Rather, those tools are what they are
only because they have been made to suit the antecedently given aims
of carpentry, a craft whose ends include inter alia the building of tables.
Some of Aristotle’s commentators have implicitly found greater
continuity than this suggests, and have wanted to minimize these sorts
of results by finding in him a view continuous with one championed
in Oxford in the mid-twentieth century. Consequently, despite Aristotle’s
regarding the soul as a substance which uses the body as a tool suited
to its own ends, as something aqcamij|m in his language, these modern
commentators have persisted in referring to the Aristotelian soul as a
“set of capacities”, 30 and have regarded him as worthy of praise for prefiguring
the contention of Gilbert Ryle that even to ask the Cartesian
question of soul-body unity is to betray a misunderstanding. The problem,
as Ryle sees it, is that anyone who poses such a question is already
implicated in some variety of category mistake. 31 It is hard to see how
the substantiality of the soul is to be reconciled with the thought that
27 The causal closure of the physical receives two non-equivalent formulations in
the contemporary literature: (i) every physical event has a complete physical
cause; and (ii) no physical event has a cause outside the physical domain. See
Kim 1998.
28 A good illustration is Kim 1996, 152: “The fact that reductionism delivers the
simplest solution to the problem of mental causation is probably the best argument
in favor of it”.
29 Burnyeat 1992, 15–26.
30 Barnes 1971/1972, and Sorabji 1974, 63 – 89.
31 Ryle 1949.