Tracking Aristotle’s Noûs

Abstract

By common account De Anima’s treatment of noûs is pulled in opposite directions by Aristotle’s finitistic and his transcendentalistic tendencies. His finitistic side wants an account of noûs to be an account of strictly individual noetic activity without mention of factors or entities extrinsic to embodied persons. Despite stirring about the possibility that noûs is independent from body, the finitistic side dominates the work. Indeed, with appropriate weighting the independence of noûs can, for the most part, be assimilated to the dominate strain. In Γ.5, however, Aristotle’s transcendentalistic side allegedly surfaces in the figure of productive mind [νoυς πoιητικός], Here commentators have taken up, roughly, three lines of interpretation. For some, Γ.5 remains exclusively interested in the individual mind and simply, in fact of course not so simply, countenances the immortality of one of its parts.¹ For others, curiously undaunted by Aristotle’s silence on the point, productive mind, while not properly a part of the individual mind, is required to complete the account of individual noetic activity.² And some, finally, retreat to the position that in Γ.5, Aristotle gestures toward the transcendent intelligences of Metaphysics Λ without intending any connection whatever with individual noetic activity.³

Some twenty years ago Marjorie Grene gave eloquent expression to the puzzles that surround Aristotle’s doctrine of noûs. In returning to the topic on this occasion I do not pretend to have solved all the puzzles but I do hope to have charmed her, at least a little, by the chase.