- 著者
-
金子 善彦
- 出版者
- 日本西洋古典学会
- 雑誌
- 西洋古典学研究 (ISSN:04479114)
- 巻号頁・発行日
- vol.55, pp.88-100, 2007
In Motu Animalium (MA, hereafter), Aristotle repeatedly says, "The soul moves the body", "Desire moves the animal", etc.. Commentators, who interpret Aristotle's philosophy of mind in a non-dualistic way, would find these claims perplexing, since they appear to imply that the soul is a non-material substance, separable from body, and imparts motion to body. Martha Nussbaum, one of the most influential proponents of the functionalistic interpretation of Aristotle, argues that the capacities of the soul are called "the movers of the animal" because of their role in the explanation of goal-directed motions, not of their causal agency, and so his claims there do not imply the Cartesian or Platonic conception of the soul as an incorporeal agent. However, although this sort of view is dominant in the recent literature, I don't think that it is a plausible reading. A number of passages in MA suggest that Aristotle takes the animal soul, or part of it, to be a causal agent in the quite literal sense, by which an animal can be moved to act. That wouldn't be so embarrassing if you saw that it is his theory of causation and other connected doctrines that lie behind the account of animal movements in MA. My aim in this paper is to show that this is a crucial aspect of Aristotle's philosophy of mind and action developed in MA. The first part of my discussion treats the MA's account of the initiation of animal (and human) movements. Aristotle explicitly says that the capacities of the soul, such as perception, imagination, thought and desire, have by themselves the power to alter a bodily organ (on his view, the heart). It is important to notice that he thinks such an alteration occurs because an animal's soul receives a certain form from the external world and thereby acquires the power to change its physiological state. The idea is that the form itself, both internal and external, has the causal efficacy by virtue of which the alteration in an animal at the material level can be brought about. I show that this idea is the key to understanding Aristotle's view, and that he makes use of it here on the basis of both the theory of formal and efficient causation he has established in Physics and his other writings, and the view which might be called "isomorphism" developed in De Anima. Next, I turn to another passage from MA. It is supposed to strongly support the functionalistic interpretation because Aristotle seems to introduce the connate pneuma to provide a material basis for mental causation. However, a careful reading will show that he insists there is a distinct type of alteration that the soul itself, rather than its material correlate, would undergo, which he calls "energeia" elsewhere. Here too he holds that a physiological change like that of pneuma takes place just as the result of this formal level causation. I conclude by suggesting in brief that such a picture of Aristotle's philosophy may throw some light on the problem of mental causation.