I would have thought so too, and maybe he had a deeper meaning lost in translation, but for a brilliant thinker, Aristotle could occasionally espouse some ideas that seem just plain stupid, at least to an ordinary modern person. I’m an ordinary modern person myself, so I’m not going to claim Aristotle was correct about this or that. I only meant to say, I don’t think we can assume that even the most sophisticated* Greeks were “materialists” at all in the modern sense. With regard to intelligence in particular, I don’t see that they “had to believe that human intelligence resulted from the operation of mechanical systems located in the human body.”
*using that term loosely, not to imply the formal school of Sophists.
I would have thought so too, and maybe he had a deeper meaning lost in translation, but for a brilliant thinker, Aristotle could occasionally espouse some ideas that seem just plain stupid, at least to an ordinary modern person. I’m an ordinary modern person myself, so I’m not going to claim Aristotle was correct about this or that. I only meant to say, I don’t think we can assume that even the most sophisticated* Greeks were “materialists” at all in the modern sense. With regard to intelligence in particular, I don’t see that they “had to believe that human intelligence resulted from the operation of mechanical systems located in the human body.”
*using that term loosely, not to imply the formal school of Sophists.