The Agency of the Soul: The Case for Substantialism Reconsidered

Abstract

The best (and most popular) evidence for substantialism reviewed so far is the evidence for the subjecthood of form and its particularity. But if this evidence were all we had to go on, there would not be much reason to take seriously the claims for substantialism. Nonetheless, there is good reason for thinking that there is some sort of substantialist dimension within Aristotle’s thought about form or soul. He speaks in substantialist terms when he speaks of form or soul as if it were a kind of agent acting with causal consequences upon the material body and thus in its acting upon the body as if it were something distinct from the body. It cannot be denied that Aristotle does speak about form or soul in an attributivist fashion, when he speaks of it as a ‘predicate’ dependent upon its ‘subject’, the material body (DA 412^a16–19), and, like the attribute on most views of its nature, as if it were nothing apart from its subject, the body. The question of the unity of body and soul is no more meaningful, maintains Aristotle, than the question of the unity of the wax and the figure in the wax (DA 412^b6 f.). The figure is nothing apart from the wax, just as any attribute of an object is nothing apart from the objects that display the attribute.