Essay 7
One of the problems of philosophy is that of exegesis. That is, how do we read the arguments of the philosophers charitably so as to clarify and explain, as best we can, how best to understand those arguments? This is non-trivial, but it is important. Now, inasmuch as I’m inexcusably late in posting it, lets take this essay home to work on at your leisure and submit next Monday, 10/28. I’ll hand out hard-copy in class Wednesday, 10/23.
In the space provided, i) explain as best you can the thesis Aristotle considers in the passage below and ii) unpack (that is, carefully explain, step by step) the arguments Aristotle presents which lead him to reject the thesis.
[411a8] Certain thinkers say that soul is intermingled in the whole universe, and it is perhaps for that reason that Thales came to the opinion that all things are full of gods. This presents some difficulties: why does the soul when it resides in air or fire [10] not form an animal, while it does so when it resides in mixtures of the elements, and that although it is held to be of higher quality when contained in the former? (One might add the question, why the soul in air is maintained to be higher and more immortal than that in animals.) Both possible ways of replying to the former question lead to absurdity or paradox; for it is beyond paradox to say that fire or air [15] is an animal, and it is absurd to refuse the name of animal to what has soul in it. The opinion that the elements have soul in them seems to have arisen from the doctrine that a whole must be homogeneous with its parts. If it is true that animals become animate by drawing into themselves a portion of what surrounds them, the partisans of this view are bound to say that the soul too is homogeneous with its parts. If the [20] air sucked in is homogeneous, but soul heterogeneous, clearly while some part of soul will exist in the inbreathed air, some other part will not. The soul must either be homogeneous, or such that there are some parts of the whole in which it is not to be found.