Episode 131: Aristotle’s “De Anima”: What Is the Mind? (Part One)

Summary: Our second discussion of De Anima or On the Soul (350 BCE), this time on book 3.<br> What is the intellect? In <a href="http://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2015/12/28/ep130-1-aristotle-biology/" target="_blank">ep. 130</a>, we talked about Aristotle's idea of the soul as the form of the body and about two of its functions or parts: the nutritive and the sensitive. Here we talk more about how sensation is supposed to work according to Aristotle, and how the sense organs interact with each other. Aristotle doesn't think, like <a href="http://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2010/05/14/episode-19-kant-what-can-we-know/" target="_blank">Kant</a>, that the mind synthesizes data from the senses to create objects. Rather, that synthesis already happens just at the level of sense, that we perceive whole objects and not points in space. We talk about how this then relates to the faculty of imagination, and finally, the intellect (nous, in Greek).<br> Continued on <a href="http://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2016/01/18/ep131-2-aristotle-mind/" target="_blank">part 2</a>, or get your ad-free, unbroken <a href="http://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2016/01/11/ep131-aristotle-mind-citizen/" target="_blank">Citizen edition</a>. <a href="http://partiallyexaminedlife.com/support" target="_blank">Please support PEL!</a><br>