Yijing Yang
University of Oslo
At the beginning of De Anima, Aristotle claims that his study of the soul aims to explain life scientifically, which comprises essential knowledge in Natural Philosophy. However, unlike mathematics, the knowledge of which can be built upon axioms and logical inductions (c.f. Post Analytics), the knowledge of life seems to be uneasy, for we are required to grasp both its essence (ousia) and attributes (sumbebeikos).
Famously, in DA II.1, Aristotle provides us with a series of definitions of soul in DA II.1: (1) The soul is the form of a natural body potentially having life; (2) The soul is the first actuality of a natural instrumental body, or a body that has organs as its instruments.
Later, In De Anima II.4, Aristotle claims that the Nutritive Soul has the power of nutrition and is responsible for two functions: nutrition and reproduction. Nutrition secures the preservation of individuals, while reproduction secures the preservation of the species. Thus, according to Aristotle, animals and plants can “partake of the eternal and divine in so far as they are capable.”
When we try to put the function of the Nutritive soul under this definition of soul, two crucial difficulties appear. One of them, as complemented by The Generation of Animals, scholars have shown that with only “nutrition” and “reproduction” as the functions of the Nutritive Soul, it is hard to provide a coherent explanation to the formation of the Embryo, and it is debatable whether ascribing an extra “formative power” to the Nutritive Soul would make the task easier.
Another difficulty concerns the embryo’s ontological status, as it is challenging to decide whether it is non-life matter, an enformed life yet without organs, or an organic body already. The puzzle here is how to account for the embryo without contradicting Aristotle’s scientific definition of life and soul.
Though these two difficulties have been discussed in different contexts, in this paper, I aim to show that they are intrinsically intertwined, and the solution to one would fundamentally shape the answer to the other. The compatibility of these two issues reflects the tension between Aristotle’s theoretical construction of the soul and its application to explanations of phenomena in nature.
While most scholars focus on the Generation of Animals and thus the embryo, I plan to take a different route, or even shortcut, with the more elementary case of the seeds of plants, using Theophrastus as complementary resources to the Aristotelian framework. Section 1 will introduce the background and argue why these two difficulties are intrinsically intertwined. Section 2 will explain the strategy of choosing plants instead of animals to tackle this problem, and in Section 3, I will provide a solution to this problem from the perspective of the seeds.
Chair: Edoardo Fazzini
Time: 05 September, 12:00 – 12:30
Location: SR 1.005
SOPhiA 2026 