This book is concerned with Aristotle’s definition of the human capacity for rational thinking (nous) offered in De anima. For Aristotle, nous is the principle, and ultimate explanans, of all the phenomena of human thinking. The book presents an in-depth interpretation of De anima III 4–8 as a single and coherent philosophical argument. More specifically, the book argues for the following views: (i) Rationalism. Humans come to know the world via two fundamentally different cognitive powers: nous
and perception. They are fundamentally different cognitive powers
because the nature of their corresponding object is fundamentally
different;
(ii) Essentialism. The
human power for thinking is defined as a capacity for directly grasping
the essences of everything there is, including itself. It is this very
capacity that Aristotle shows to be the principle of all other kinds of
human thinking;
(iii) Separatism. Human nous
is unmixed with the body, has no dedicated bodily organ, and is
separable from the body. As a result, it cannot be assimilated to any of
the other parts of the soul. While nous belongs to our essence as human beings, it is not part of the natural world;
(iv) Embeddedness in the cognitive soul. Human nous is embedded in a cognitive soul. Among other things, this means that the distinctive activity of human nous—thinking—can only take place in the context of a larger set of activities which are common to the body and the soul.
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