Well, I’d agree that it’s much better than élan vital. And as I’m reading it because of this discussion, it really isn’t about the modern conception of souls—“de anima” here is more like “on the essence of animals.” But there are plenty of individual wrong conclusions, where one could “improve on Aristotle without resorting to methods that were simply unavailable to him.” Skimming through book 3, we get stuff like this:
That there is no sixth sense in addition to the five enumerated-sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch-may be established by the following considerations:
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Therefore, since everything is a possible object of thought, mind in order, as Anaxagoras says, to dominate, that is, to know, must be pure from all admixture; for the co-presence of what is alien to its nature is a hindrance and a block: it follows that it too, like the sensitive part, can have no nature of its own, other than that of having a certain capacity. Thus that in the soul which is called mind (by mind I mean that whereby the soul thinks and judges) is, before it thinks, not actually any real thing. For this reason it cannot reasonably be regarded as blended with the body: if so, it would acquire some quality, e.g. warmth or cold, or even have an organ like the sensitive faculty: as it is, it has none.
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the soul is in a way all existing things; for existing things are either sensible or thinkable, and knowledge is in a way what is knowable, and sensation is in a way what is sensible
(“in a way” here meaning that like is required to sense like, and like is required to recognize like thoughts. So, false)
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An animal is a body with soul in it: every body is tangible, i.e. perceptible by touch; hence necessarily, if an animal is to survive, its body must have tactual sensation.
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Okay, I think that’s enough. So I do now feel that De Anima is better than I’d represented it as, but it invents models more complicated than justified, and so gets some wrong conclusions, which could have been avoided if stuff had not been made up.
Well, I’d agree that it’s much better than élan vital. And as I’m reading it because of this discussion, it really isn’t about the modern conception of souls—“de anima” here is more like “on the essence of animals.” But there are plenty of individual wrong conclusions, where one could “improve on Aristotle without resorting to methods that were simply unavailable to him.” Skimming through book 3, we get stuff like this:
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(“in a way” here meaning that like is required to sense like, and like is required to recognize like thoughts. So, false)
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Okay, I think that’s enough. So I do now feel that De Anima is better than I’d represented it as, but it invents models more complicated than justified, and so gets some wrong conclusions, which could have been avoided if stuff had not been made up.