Descartes And Aristotle Reflection Paper

While Descartes and Aristotle have numerous differences in thought, time period, cultural perspectives, backgrounds, agendas, and understanding of philosophy, the most important difference is how they each in turn, define the soul, and how it relates, interacts, or adheres with the body.

Aristotle:

What Plato called ideals; Aristotle called essence (or form), and its opposite, matter. Matter is without shape or form or purpose. It is just “stuff,” pure potential, no actuality. Essence is what provides the shape or form or purpose to matter. Essence is “perfect,” “complete,” but it has no substance, no solidity.This theory was dubbed Hylomorphism, and Aristotle applied this to a soul, but he uses terms like matter (body) and form (soul

Life is a property of living things, just as knowledge and health are. Therefore, a soul is a “form”—that is, a “specifying principle or cause”—of a living thing. Aristotle says that a soul is related to its body, as “form to matter.” In short, a soul is a sort of divine source that sparks life into a body. A soul cannot exist without the body, but a body can without a soul (though it would be a dead corpse). The two are supposed to be lumped together; essence and matter need each other. However, the soul is not a component in and of itself, but a force, an activator, a “spark” that animates the body. Essence realizes (“makes real”) matter. This process, the movement from formless stuff to complete being, is called actualization. According to Aristotle this spark is the powers of nourishment, perception, locomotion, and

He believes that the body and soul are two separate entities, and neither is a force as Aristotle said. For Descartes, the soul is the mind (or one’s consciousness), is a “thinking thing,” an “incorporeal thing,” which can exist “without the corporal thing” (the body). The mind is a nonphysical, and therefore, non-spatial substance. Descartes clearly identified the mind as consciousness and self-awareness and distinguished this from the brain as the source of intelligence.

This is in direct opposition to what Aristotle postulated about the body and soul, believing that they were conjoined and inseparable. Descartes claims that they are separable and dissimilar, yet they interact. A person is nothing more than a machine made of body and mind, as a clock or an automaton; we are simply a machine, made by the “hands of God.” The two parts interact, with the mind affecting the body through the contraction of muscles into the movement of motor function. As well as through perception, where the body affects the mind, with our eyes producing sight