As Christopher Shields has argued, it is Aristotle’s carefully worked out account of the unity of form and matter, not an appeal to category mistakes, that leads him to claim that he can account for the unity of body and soul (“The Priority of Soul in Aristotle’s De Anima: Mistaking Categories?” in Dorothea Frede and Burkhard Reis, editors, Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy, Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009). Thus soul, for Alexander, is always existentially dependent on body and cannot exist without it.Īlexander’s approach deserves careful attention as he avoids some of the problems of contemporary functionalist interpretations of Aristotle, for example, claiming that Aristotle treats the soul as an attribute of the body, like health, and not as a substance, so that ascribing activities to the soul is a straightforward category mistake. In his interpretative notes, Victor Caston convincingly argues that Alexander thinks the soul supervenes on the bodies that give rise to it (n. Of particular interest is Alexander’s naturalistic understanding of the soul, on which the soul is a “power and form and completion of the body that has it, as it comes into being from a certain mixture and blend of the primary bodies” (24.3–4). Alexander develops and systematizes many of Aristotle’s fundamental notions with a number of important results. While not a commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima, Alexander’s own On the Soul pursues the same topic with a similar method and structure.
Its contents will be of particular interest to scholars interested in prime matter or in naturalist interpretations of the soul. This excellent volume should encourage further study of Alexander. After years of neglect, Alexander of Aphrodisias is making a comeback, with scholars increasingly recognizing his value as an interpreter of Aristotle and as a philosopher in his own right.
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