Plato and Aristotle On What Is Common to Soul and Body. Some Remarks on a Complicated Issue

Abstract

Aristotelian scholars tend to reject the Cartesian dualism as applied to Aristotelian model of the soul, and favor the view that denies that the soul is radically opposed to body. This is so due the fact that Aristotle takes the living being to be a unified whole (composed by form and matter). I start by reminding that both Plato and Aristotle argue that by their very nature soul and body are different, but at the same time they maintain that there are things that are ‘common’ to soul and body. The issue is how it is possible that two entities so different in nature have something in common. I argue that the key to the problem lies in the fact that both Plato and Aristotle regard the soul and the body as capacities, and that – in so far as they are able to act and to be acted upon – such is the ‘commonality’ shared both by soul and body. Given that capacities are relational entities, both of them turn out to be very plastic notions that should not necessarily be understood as entirely foreign to each other.