Adam Wood

In this essay I argue first that De anima 3.4–5 shows Aristotle answering affirmatively a question that he raises near the beginning of the work, namely, whether any of the soul’s affections are proper to it alone. Second, I argue that this initial conclusion reveals something important about the very first question that Aristotle broaches in the work, viz., the method and starting-points employed in the science of the soul. Aristotle’s position, I claim, shows that investigating the human soul is not merely an empirical concern discharged by natural science but also a rational concern discharged by logic, epistemology, and possibly even metaphysics. I defend these views against two rival interpretations of the passage, the “transcendental interpretation,” on which it does not describe a faculty immanent to human beings at all, and the “bad science interpretation,” on which it does but only as the result of Aristotle’s faulty physiology of cognition.

Given certain anti-Pelagian assumptions he endorses, Aquinas faces an “arbitrariness problem” explaining why God predestines and reprobates the particular individuals he does. One response to the problem that Aquinas offers—biting the bullet and conceding God’s arbitrariness—has a high theoretical cost. Eleonore Stump proposes a less costly alternative solution on Thomas’s behalf, drawing on his notion that our wills may rest in a state of “quiescence.” Her proposal additionally purports to answer the general question why God reprobates anyone at all. I argue that Aquinas’s understanding of the relationship between divine causation and human freedom prevents him from accepting Stump’s proposal as she herself puts it forward; he couldn’t accept it as an answer to the general question. Nevertheless, I claim, granted one controversial but widely accepted assumption—that he isn’t a divine determinist—Aquinas could accept a slightly modified version of her quiescence solution to the arbitrariness problem. Indeed, there is evidence that he did accept some of its key components.

In a 1642 letter to Regius, Descartes elaborates several reasons for rejecting Aristotelian substantial forms including that (1) they are explanatorily impotent, (2) they are explanatorily unnecessary, and (3) they threaten the incorporeality and immortality of the human soul. Various ideas have already been proposed as to why Descartes thought Aristotelian substantial forms are susceptible to these criticisms. Here I suggest one further such idea, centered on the ways Descartes and medieval scholastics thought substantial forms—and souls in particular—are related to their powers.