Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- COMMENTARY ON DE ANIMA: : Book 1
- COMMENTARY ON DE ANIMA: Book 2
- COMMENTARY ON DE ANIMA: Book 3
- 1 In the World As It Is There Can Be but the Five Senses
- 2 What Allows for Perceiving That We Perceive; Sense Joins in a Common Power so That the Five Senses Are Subfaculties of a Central Sense Faculty
- 3 Distinguishing Sense and Thought; What Is Phantasia?
- 4 What Is Mind as That Capable of Thinking All Things
- 5 What Enables Thinking to Occur
- 6 The Sorts of Intelligible Objects
- 7 Phantasia Has a Role in All Thinking
- 8 That Mind Can Think All Things
- 9 There Is a Capacity for Progressive Motion
- 10 The Desiderative Capacity Is the Primary Cause of Progressive Motion
- 11 Even the Simplest Animals Have Indefinite Phantasia, and Calculative Phantasia Fits the Account of Progressive Motion
- 12 The Necessary Order of the Faculties of Soul
- 13 The Sort of Body Requisite to Support the Order of the Faculties of Soul
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - What Enables Thinking to Occur
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- COMMENTARY ON DE ANIMA: : Book 1
- COMMENTARY ON DE ANIMA: Book 2
- COMMENTARY ON DE ANIMA: Book 3
- 1 In the World As It Is There Can Be but the Five Senses
- 2 What Allows for Perceiving That We Perceive; Sense Joins in a Common Power so That the Five Senses Are Subfaculties of a Central Sense Faculty
- 3 Distinguishing Sense and Thought; What Is Phantasia?
- 4 What Is Mind as That Capable of Thinking All Things
- 5 What Enables Thinking to Occur
- 6 The Sorts of Intelligible Objects
- 7 Phantasia Has a Role in All Thinking
- 8 That Mind Can Think All Things
- 9 There Is a Capacity for Progressive Motion
- 10 The Desiderative Capacity Is the Primary Cause of Progressive Motion
- 11 Even the Simplest Animals Have Indefinite Phantasia, and Calculative Phantasia Fits the Account of Progressive Motion
- 12 The Necessary Order of the Faculties of Soul
- 13 The Sort of Body Requisite to Support the Order of the Faculties of Soul
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The previous chapter emphasized that mind that is part of the soul must be unmixed and separate to think all things. This, it was argued, is consistent with the possibility of thinking, for both mind and its principal object, where these are theoretical knowledge and its object, share the condition of being unenmattered. Aristotle now clarifies just what it is that acts in mind to originate thinking if human mind is primarily potentiality to think all things. All he has to explain is what enters into occasioning this thinking, not to go into detail about the way it arises or to account for the development of concepts or knowledge. He merely has to follow out the implications of his remarks ending the previous chapter. Since theoretical knowledge is the same as the knowable, whereas the external sensible object acts upon the sense to make it operate, the intelligible object may give rise to thinking by way of the knowledge already within the soul. He needs to show that the mind can get itself thinking without seeming an impossible causa sui or self-mover.
Aristotle had said in 430a5–6 that one might consider why we are not always thinking. Divine beings will ceaselessly be thinking, but this does not seem to apply for humans. The reason must be that mind that belongs to soul, as he has established, is potentiality for thinking, and whatever is a potentiality can be or not be (see Metaphysics 1071b13–14, b19).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Aristotle's De AnimaA Critical Commentary, pp. 458 - 472Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007