Aristotle's On the Soul: A Critical Guide ed. by Caleb M. Cohoe (review)

Reviewed by: Aristotle's On the Soul: A Critical Guide ed. by Caleb M. Cohoe Attila Hangai Caleb M. Cohoe, editor. Aristotle's On the Soul: A Critical Guide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Hardback, 99. 99. Guiding readers through Aristotle's science of the soul, this volume covers many major topics of De Anima (DA) and addresses specific questions, including perennial interpretive problems. The self-contained chapters approach the text either by illuminating its context or by elucidating key psychological concepts. While some contributions refer to relevant End Page 318 positions by Aristotle's predecessors or contemporary philosophers, connections drawn to other Aristotelian texts predominate. Throughout, the emphasis is on philosophical questions. The result is a first-rate philosophical guide through this densely written treatise, which allows experienced readers of DA to deepen their understanding of Aristotelian psychology. Since most chapters approach interpretive issues from new angles and presuppose familiarity with the existing scholarship, beginners may want to start elsewhere. In Reeve's reading (chapter 1), Aristotle pursues dialectic in DA to define the soul as the first principle for the science of life. He construes dialectic as "going through puzzles and solving them by appeal to endoxa" (21), and equates it with induction from perceptual experience to knowledge of principles and causes. Contesting this view, Carter (chapter 2) argues that the physicist's method is not dialectical because the predecessors' views, conflicting as they are, do not constitute endoxa. Through close readings of DA II. 2–5, he shows that Aristotle investigates earlier theories to assess how well they explain the main functions of the soul. One pertinent theory takes the soul to be attunement (harmonia). Shields (chapter 4) elucidates Aristotle's case for hylomorphism as an advance over the harmonia theory. Although harmonia (as the proper arrangement of parts) implies normativity, it falls short of rendering the soul as a final cause with its own good, so it cannot explain the unity of the body. Frey's chapter 5 on the soul's unity deals with this latter function. The problem of unity stems from the fact that each level in the hierarchy of souls—nutritive, perceptual, rational—can be defined independently, yet a posterior soul presupposes the existence of all prior ones. The key Frey uses to understand unity is potential presence. Just as a triangle is present potentially in a quadrangle—for division of the latter yields triangles—so too is the nutritive soul present potentially in the perceptual soul, although not due to a separating act. This, however, has counterintuitive implications: animal nutrition would be the function of a perceptual soul; furthermore, the nutritive soul of the embryo (in Frey's biological example) would first be present potentially (as undeveloped) and, once actualized (when developed), would revert to potentiality (at the development of the perceptual soul). Frey's other proposal is more promising. It turns on the notion of natural continuity: having an internal cause for a characteristic change with a unitary goal. Thus, the soul's unity for Frey (despite his reservations) seems to boil down to teleology: the soul sets a goal achieved through the manifestation of species-specific life functions. Invoking the biology of animal reproduction, Gelber (chapter 6) complements the teleological unity regarding the nutritive soul-part with the unity constituted by the continuity of the processes of nutrition, growth, and reproduction, namely, unity by material and efficient causes. Among the three contributions on reason (nous), Scheiter (chapter 3), examining its separability, breaks with the traditional interpretation and takes Aristotle to show (in DA III. 4 and I. 3) that reason is independent not only of bodily organs but of any magnitude (megethos). This envisages DA III. 4–8 as an investigation into how reason functions as a different kind of capacity. It turns out, according to Kelsey's insightful chapter 11, that reason's actuality—insight (noēsis) —is the same as its intelligible object (noēton), and so intelligibility depends on separation from matter by the actuality of reason, making all and only the immaterial things intelligible and intelligent. Cohoe (chapter 12) draws the conclusion: human reason for Aristotle—being the defining part of the human soul, most. . .