Aristotelian Anti-Dualism:
Aristotle, thus, opposes Platonic or Cartesian dualism. Body and soul together make up one substance. A major problem that Aristotle and Aquinas see with dualism is that it cannot explain why the soul, if it essentially different from and superior to the body, should be united to the body. For Aristotle and Aquinas, however, it is for the good of the soul (or rather, it is for the good of the composite which has its vital activities in virtue of its soul) that the soul is united to the body; a body is necessary for a soul to exercise all vital capacities, since (almost) all vital functions are the functions of body and soul together. The sensitive soul requires a body, since the acts of sensation, of seeing, for example, require bodily organs. Similarly, the act of intellection, which is proper to humans alone, requires sensation, and sensation in turn requires a body. Thus, if human beings are to exercise their proper functions, they necessarily must have a body.
Aquinas, interestingly, appeals to personal experience in his claim that a person is not his soul, or his intellect, alone, as Plato and Descartes claim. A man cannot be merely a mind without a body
because it is one and the same man who is conscious both that he understands and that he senses. But one cannot sense without a body, and therefore the body must be some part of man.(Summa Theologiae Ia 76, 1).
If a man were just a mind, essentially unrelated to the body, he would not directly experience things that happen to the body, as he clearly does when he senses. Therefore, the human soul is in essence the substantial form of a human body, and body and soul together make up one substance.
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