green1998

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History of Psychology Copyright 1998 by the Educational Publishing Foundation
1998, Vol. l,No. 1,8-20 1093-4510/98/S3.00
THE THOROUGHLY MODERN ARISTOTLE:
Was He Really a Functionalist?
Christopher D. Green
York University
In recent years a debate has developed over whether Aristotle's theory of the psuche
is properly characterized as having been "functionalist" in the sense that contempo-
rary computational cognitive scientists claim to be adherents of that position. It is
argued here that there are indeed some similarities between Aristotle's theory and
that of contemporary functionalists but that the differences between them make it
misleading, at best, for functionalists to look to Aristotle for ancient support. In
particular, it is argued that Aristotle would not have—indeed, specifically did
not—support the claim, central to functionalism, that the mind can in principle be
transported from one body to another simply by instantiating in the new body some
set of organizational properties that were instantiated in the old.
Aristotle's theory of the psuche was firmly rooted in his broader metaphysics,
according to which all things are a combination of matter, or hule—a sometimes
shadowy, indefinite stuff with the potential to become almost anything—and form,
or morphe, which transforms matter into actual particular things. For instance, take
some bronze, add the form of Pericles, and you have a statue of the great Athenian
general. In this very simple case, "form" reduces to something very much like
"shape." The meaning is much broader than this, however. Take some wood, for
instance, add the form of a chair, and you have a chair. Notice here that the "form"
does not just mean the shape of a chair but includes something of its functional
characteristics as well. If you doubt this, imagine what would happen if you tried
to add the "form" of a chair to some soapsuds. Although form was clearly
dominant in Aristotle's metaphysical thinking, matter was not by any means
excluded utterly, as is sometimes implied. Matter was thought to be necessary, just
not sufficient. Finally, consider a third example that brings us closer to the topic of
this article: Take a human body, combine it with the "form" of life, and you have a
living human. In this case, the term form has to do almost entirely with
function—biological and psychological function, broadly speaking—rather than
shape. This particular form—the one that turns a body into a living human—was
what Aristotle identified as the psuche. To be fair, Aristotle did not believe that
matter and form were "added" together, like so many things in a recipe. That
aspect of these examples is purely pedagogical. Matter and form were tools of
conceptual analysis, ways of getting at the definitions and explanations of things.
This metaphysical framework, in which things are analyzed with respect to their
form and matter, is called hylomorphism.
Beyond these basic principles, however, almost every aspect of the interpreta-
tion of Aristotle's theory of the psuche has generated controversy. It is perhaps not
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Christopher D. Green,
Department of Psychology, York University, North York, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3. Electronic mail
may be sent to christo@yorku.ca. Christopher D. Green's World Wide Web address is http://
www.yorku.ca/faculty/academic/christo.
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ARISTOTLE AND FUNCTIONALISM 9
surprising that the debate about what sort of theory Aristotle proposed has, at least
over the last few decades, pretty well tracked the debate about what sort of a theory
of mind is actually true. Because Aristotle's theory of the psuche seems to have so
much to do with "function," there has been a movement of late to assimilate his
thought on the topic to contemporary computational functionalism.1 In this article I
critically review the leading interpretations of Aristotle's theory of the psuche over
the last 15 years, particularly those that claim that Aristotle was a functionalist with
respect to the relation between body and psuche. A review is not the sole purpose
of this article, however. I conclude by arguing that there is a general sense in which
Aristotle might be considered to have been a distant relative of computational
functionalists but that it courts serious error and glaring anachronism to construe
this in a way that puts Aristotle at the head of a line of thought that leads directly to
that school of thought (viz., artificial-intelligence-inspired cognitive science).
I first examine some of the historically more significant options with respect to
mind-body relations. Substance dualism is a position advanced by Rene Descartes
in the 17th century. It holds that there are separate "substances" corresponding to
the body (viz., matter) and the mind. Descartes called this mental substance the res
cogitans. Descartes's position came under attack almost immediately. One of the
most damaging criticisms was that if the mind is thought to cause the body to
move, as Descartes believed, how can an immaterial mental substance cause the
material substance of the body to do anything? Cause is a relation traditionally
thought to hold only between two (or more) material entities. Partly as a result of
this critique, people very soon began working to develop monist theories—
theories that posit only one kind of basic substance.
There are, obviously, two basic monist alternatives to Descartes: idealism,
which posits that there is only mental substance (and that the body, and all other
matter, is just a "projection," or somesuch, of the mind), and materialism, which
posits that there is only material substance (and that the mind is somehow material,
or does not exist at all). One very well-known sort of materialist theory of the mind
(perhaps, better, an "anti-theory" of mind) is behaviorism. Behaviorism2 holds
that all mental talk (e.g., "Horatio wants to play baseball.") is really just talk about
dispositions to behave in certain ways (e.g., "Given appropriate conditions,
Horatio is likely to play baseball.") (Some behaviorists have argued that they are
not materialists but are "agnostic" about all metaphysical questions, in the manner
of the logical positivists. For my present purposes they count as materialists in at
least the minimal sense that they do not propose any nonmaterial substances and
are inclined to treat the investigation of animal behavior in precisely the same way
they would treat the behavior of nonliving entities, such as planets, stars, and
chemicals.)
Another materialist theory of mind, called physicalism, also was popular in the
middle of the 20th century. One form of physicalism3 popular in the 1950s holds
'Lest there be any confusion, this article does not discuss the possibility that there may be some
sort of connection between Aristotle's position on the psucM and a position called functionalism that
was advocated by Dewey, Angell, Carr, and others during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
2The are many different specific formulations of behaviorism. The one discussed here is the one
entertained by philosophers, particularly Gilbert Ryle (1949), during the middle of the 20th century.
Others, formulated by psychologists such as Watson, Tolman, Hull, and Skinner, differ somewhat.
3See, in particular, Feigl (1960/1970) and Smart (1959/1970).
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10 GREEN
that anything one says about the mind can—and should, if one wants to be
scientific—be redescribed as something about the activity of the brain. This is a
strongly reductive form of materialism in that it claims that descriptions of mental
events can be "reduced" todescriptions about neurological ones. Put another way,
it claims that mental events and brain events are identical. For this reason this form
of physicalism is sometimes called identity theory. One important implication of
physicalism is that there need not be such a thing as consciousness, one of the
primary attributes of Descartes's res cogitans (but see Place, 1956).
At about the same time that physicalism rose to prominence, it also became
popular to claim that Aristotle's theory was of renewed importance precisely
because it had been physicalist (though Aristotle, or course, never said so,
specifically); he never seemed to say anything specifically about consciousness in
De anima4 or his other works (given some narrow interpretations of certain words
such as aisthesis, "sensation" or "perception"). This is where our story about the
modern interpretation of Aristotle begins.
Preliminary Sparring: Early Departures From the Physicalist Interpretation
of Aristotle
In the early 1970s Jonathan Barnes (1971-1972/1979) argued that the position
in favor of Aristotle's having been a physicalist is erroneous (p. 32). Although he
conceded that Aristotle never proposed a mental substance, as had Descartes, this
did not commit Aristotle to physicalism, as had often been supposed (p. 34).
Instead, Barnes claimed that Aristotle's theory is both nonsubstantialist (i.e.,
claiming that there is no mental substance) and nonphysicalist (i.e., claiming that
thepsuche is not completely redescribable in purely physical terms). The question,
then, for Barnes was to articulate a materialist interpretation of Aristotle (for if
Aristotle were not a materialist, then there would be little point in discussing him
seriously at all in the Zeitgeist of the early 1970s), without its being strictly
physicalist. What Barnes ultimately argued was that Aristotle's theory holds that
the psuche is only an attribute or property of the matter of which the body is
composed (in the sense that a functioning body can be said to have the property of
being alive, but there is no particular material part that can be credited with giving
life to the body). This position is sometimes called property dualism because,
although it denies that there is a mental substance of the sort that Descartes
proposed, it accepts that there may be mental properties (such as sensations and
consciousness) that are somehow products of the (organization of the) matter of
the body. Although Barnes denied believing Aristotle's theory to be correct, he said
that it seems "at least as good a buy as anything else currently on the philosophical
market. Philosophy of mind has for centuries been whirled between a Cartesian
Charybdis and a scientific [i.e., physicalist] Scylla: Aristotle has the look of an
Odysseus" (p. 41).5
4I have made use of several translations of De anima in the writing of this article. Among these
were Lawson-Tancred's (1986), Hicks's (1993, in Durrani's Aristotle's De anima in Focus), and
Kelt's (1986). I have also, of course, had some recourse to Smith's (1941, in McKeon's The Basic
Works of Aristotle, and Barnes's (1984, in The Complete Works of Aristotle).
5Scylla and Charybdis were said in Greek myth to be two monsters lhat guard the Slrails of
Messina, between Italy and Sicily. The story of Odysseus's navigation past them is lold in Book XII
of ihe Odyssey.
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ARISTOTLE AND FUNCTIONALISM 11
Richard Sorabji (1974) argued against both the traditional physicalist view of
Aristotle's theory and Barnes's "attribute theory," as well as against the view,
which he said was still held by some, that Aristotle was a dualist of the Cartesian
sort.6 Instead, he claimed, "Aristotle's view is something sui generis. It is not to be
identified with the positions of more recent philosophers" (p. 64). Sorabji was
most impressed with Aristotle's comparison of the relation of the psuche and the
body to that holding between a house and the bricks of which it is made. These
cannot be identical, as physicalism argues, because, as Sorabji pointed out, the
"bricks can outlast the house" (p. 78). Aristotle's view was not Cartesian either,
however, because he believed the psuche to be dependent for its existence on the
body in a way Descartes did not (just like a house is dependent on the bricks out of
which it is made for its existence). Descartes believed the mind to be separable
from the body, at least in principle. Aristotle stated several times, however, mat it is
not.7 Thus, Sorabji claimed, "Aristotle improves on some present-day materialists,
and on Descartes" (p. 78). Sorabji's ultimate interpretation of Aristotle's theory is
difficult to paraphrase. He focuses on Aristotle's claim (in De motu animalium)
that desire is just a heating of the blood around the heart. This heating is said to
cause an expansion which, in turn, moves the body. Given this account, Sorabji
argued, the fact "that desire should cause movement is no more (and no less)
puzzling than that heating around the heart would cause expansion. But if desires
lead to movement, then there is a sense in which the capacity for desire is
responsible for movement" (p. 86). The capacity itself is not material, though it is
dependent on being composed of particular materials, just as the house is
dependent on being made of certain materials to satisfy its function of being a
shelter (consider, for instance, a house made of tissues). Because Aristotle said
repeatedly that the psuche is a set of functions or capacities (for nutrition,
perception, etc.), Sorabji concluded that "this in turn means that the [psuche] is
responsible for movement" (p. 86).
Even though Sorabji claimed not to want to assimilate Aristotle's theory to any
modern one, Howard M. Robinson (1978) argued that Sorabji's interpretation is
very close to being functionalist. Functionalism8 is another (at least faintly)
materialist view of mind that rose to ascendancy when physicalism and behavior-
ism began to fall out of favor in the 1960s and 1970s. Recall that behaviorism says,
roughly, that mental talk is "really" just talk about dispositions to behave in certain
ways. Functionalism, to a first approximation, is the claim that this is not quite
good enough. According to functionalists, the disposition to behave in a certain
way must be accompanied by some sort of "internal state" for that disposition to
be considered psychological. A cone, for instance, when set upon its point, might
6Sorabji (1974, p. 70), in fact, assimilated Barnes's view to that of the Cartesian, arguing that the
true materialist (he cited Rorty, 1970) must give up talk of mental properties altogether.
7Only the "active intellect," discussed briefly and obscurely in III.5 ofDe anima, was said to be
immortal, unchangeable, and separable from the body. It apparently flies in the face of the rest of
Aristotle's theory of the psuche and thus haunts much of the current discussion, in the sense that few
discuss it openly but everyone knows it is there, lurking in the background. As do most, I discuss it
below only very briefly, for if it is taken at face value then there is no point in Aristotle's theory as an
interesting alternative to Cartesian dualism. The rest of the theory, however, has much of interest to
offer.
8Again, this should not be confused with the evolutionary functionalism of Dewey, Angell, Carr,
and others.
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be said to have a disposition to fall over, but this does not warrant psychological
descriptions of its behavior (e.g., that it wants to fall). Psychology, then, according
to the functionalist, is the study of the structure of these internal states, not just the
identification of the dispositions for which they are responsible. In the 1960s, the
structures of these internal states began to be explored by way of attempts to
simulate them with computer programs of various kinds. The claim that the
internal states must operate in the same way as computer programs is called
computational functionalism andis the ground of much of the work done in
artificial intelligence and contemporary cognitive science.9
One of the key implications of functionalism is that minds can, in principle, be
"transported" into any physical system that can be arranged so as to preserve the
functional relations. Thus, a human mind could, for instance, be instantiated in an
electronic computer, provided the computer was programmed properly (the
famous artificial intelligence researcher Marvin Minsky has even suggested this as
a solution to the problem of human mortality!). This is known as the transportabil-
ity thesis and figures crucially in the argument below.
Round 1: The First Functionalist Interpretation of Aristotle
and Its Rebuttal
Although Robinson (1978) criticized Sorabji (1974) for assimilating Aristot-
le's theory to contemporary functionalism despite Sorabji's denial that this is what
he had attempted to do, Robinson's critique was not completely misplaced, for the
archfunctionalist of the early 1970s, Hilary Putnam (1975b), quipped that "what
we [functionalists] are really interested in, as Aristotle saw, is form and not matter.
What is our intellectual form? is the question, not what the matter is" (1975b, p.
302). Robinson (1978, p. 115) countered that Aristotle's theory is not functionalist
because Aristotle was, after all, crucially concerned with the issue of awareness (or
consciousness) of sensations, something that functionalism denies (or, at best,
ignores). Notice that this view is exactly the opposite of that which led physicalists
to show renewed interest in Aristotle's theory earlier in the century. Putnam's quip
was developed by Martha Nussbaum (1978) into a full-blown interpretation of
Aristotle's psychology. In an extended mock dialogue between Aristotle and the
ancient materialist Democritus, Nussbaum explicitly linked hylomorphism to
functionalism, though she was silent on the question of whether computational
structure might be one of the kinds of forms Aristotle could have accepted.
In an article critical of Nussbaum's (1978) functionalist interpretation of
Aristotle, Robinson (1983) argued that Aristotle's theory is, contrary to most 20th
century interpretations, dualistic after all. The primary piece of evidence he
brought forward for this view is Aristotle's account of the active intellect (De
anima, III.5), which is plainly said to be immaterial and separable from the body.
Most 20th century interpreters of Aristotle have tended to ignore this fact, focusing
instead on the possibility that the rest of Aristotle's theory of psychology might
help extricate us from the dilemma in which Descartes is often blamed for having
caught us. Robinson (p. 124) said that materialists have typically tried to dismiss
the active intellect as the unfortunate effect of Aristotle's overall metaphysical
position and not a central part of his psychological theory in any case. According to
9See, in particular, Putnam (1960/1975a) and Fodor (1968, 1975,1981).
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Robinson (p. 127), however, the active intellect is essential to Aristotle's theory if
he is to have an account of how people can think about abstract properties (such as
being a triangle). Recognizing that most people would not be convinced by this
argument, however, Robinson went on to argue that there is other evidence that
Aristotle's theory is dualistic through and through. In particular, he pointed to an
analogy Aristotle offered in Book I of De anima—that the psuche bears the same
relation to the body as does a sailor to his ship. By Robinson's light no plausible
nondualistic interpretation of this analogy is possible. Others, however, have
dismissed the sailor analogy as a mere turn of phrase, indicating nothing essential
about Aristotle's position.
Robinson (1983) was quick to point out, however, that he does not take
Aristotle's dualism to have been equivalent to that of Descartes. It is, he said,
"more sophisticated" (p. 132) than that of Descartes because the hylomorphic
(i.e., matter and form) relation posited between body and mind is "more intimate"
(p. 132) than the simple causal relation proposed by Descartes. Robinson's
attempts, however, to articulate the differences between Aristotle's and Descartes's
dualisms are obscure. Most clearly, he noted (pp. 141-142) that for Aristotle the
conscious subject is the compound of mind and body, rather than, as for Descartes,
the mental substance alone, somehow "trapped" in the body. Thus, Aristotle's
theory goes some way toward explaining why consciousness cannot exist apart
from a body (viz., it requires bodily sense organs to get thought-objects of which to
be conscious). Robinson does little, however, to explain just how Aristotle's
supposed dualism differs from that of Descartes without itself becoming nondual-
istic.
In response to Robinson (1983), Nussbaum (1984) rightly pointed out some of
the tremendous differences between Aristotle's and Descartes's positions. The
most important of these has to do with the metaphysical scope of Aristotle's
hylomorphism as opposed to Descartes's dualism. Dualism addresses only the
issue of the relation of the body to the mind (or soul). Hylomorphism, by contrast,
addresses the much broader question of just what a substance—any substance—is.
The application of this framework to the mind-body problem (and I use the term
mind here quite broadly, recognizing that Aristotle's psuche does not map onto our
mind very exactly) is but a special case of a larger metaphysical position. To put
things perhaps more concretely, dualism has nothing to say about the existence of
chairs and houses, whereas hylomorphism is specifically directed at just such
problems; the difference between a pile of bricks and a building is, roughly, that the
building-form has been combined with brick-matter to result in a new kind of
thing, one that can function as a shelter. Neither the bricks alone, nor the
building-form alone (whatever that might be), could do that.
Between Rounds: Functionalism Licks Its Wounds
Another well-known attempt to explicate Aristotle's theory is Christopher
Shields's (1988) article "Soul and Body in Aristotle." Shields considered four
options with respect to the interpretation of Aristotle: (1) that the psuche is
identical with the body, (2) that the psuche is an attribute of the body, (3) that the
body "constitutes" the psuche, and (4) that \hepsuche is an immaterial substance.
The first of these options—identity theory—is quickly dispensed with: Aristotle
himself says in Metaphysics, "when the [components of some thing] have been
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broken up, something no longer exists . . . but the elements [continue to] exist"
(1041b). If body and psuche were identical, one could not cease to exist and the
other continue to exist.
The second option, attribute theory, is described by Shields (1988) as being the
claim that "persons are material substances which none the less have immaterial
properties which are causally or non-causally necessitated by physical states of the
body" (p. 112). For instance, we may continue to talk coherently about thoughts
and beliefs as we traditionally have as long as we recognize that they are
immaterial properties of the activity of the brain (in much the same way we may
talk about the value of a house, even though we recognize that it is ontologically
dependent—though obviously in quite complex ways—on the matter of which the
house, and perhaps other nearby objects, are constructed). Shields identified
Barnes (1971-1972/1979) as the primary advocate of this position and glosses his
argument as follows:
1) Persons have some immaterial states;
2) These cannot be states of the soul, since it is not substantial;
3) Therefore, they must be states of the body or compound (of body and soul), both
of which are material;
Therefore, Aristotle is an attribute theorist, (p. 112)
Shields rejected Premise 2 "onthe ground that souls are forms and so are
substantial" (p. 112). At first blush this would seem to be a highly tendentious
claim, dependent entirely on how one chooses to interpret "substance." The threat
of equivocating between the Aristotelian and normal contemporary meanings
looms large. Shields recognized this, however, admitting that "the possibility that
Aristotle is any sort of attribute theorist collapses into the question of whether the
soul is constituted by matter" (p. 112) and thus moved on to Option 3; namely, that
the body constitutes the psuche.
The notion of "constitution" being used here is a tricky one. Shields (1988)
defined it thus: "Let us say that the body constitutes the [psuche] if and only if at
any given point in its history, the [psuche] has all and only the non-historical and
non-modal properties the body has" (p. 113). To understand these caveats, it may
be easier to work with the example of a house. Imagine a certain house which is the
home of a man named Klink. If it were identical with Klink's home, you would not
be able to say anything about it qua house that cannot be said about it qua Klink's
home. One thing that can be said about the house, however, is that it was
previously owned by someone else—say, another man, named Krank. It is not true,
however, of Klink's home that it was previously owned by Krank. It was not then
Klink's home. Klink's home was then someplace else, presumably. Thus the house
and the home are not identical. According to Shields's definition of constitution,
however, historical properties, such as this one, are excluded from the constitution
relation, so this argument cannot be run against the claim that the house constitutes
Klink's home.
Another thing that could be said of the house is that it could possibly have been
owned by someone else now (if, for instance, Klink had died before buying it). In
the situation in which Klink were dead, however, it would not be right to say that
Klink's home could possibly be owned by someone else (for there would not be a
"Klink's home" to own). Thus, again, they are shown not to be identical.
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Possibility, however, is a modal property, and these are excluded from the
definition of constitution. So, if all the other properties hold—for example, that
both the house and the home can be said to be painted white—this house may be
said to constitute Klink's home but not be identical with it.
Among the properties that both the constituting and the constituted thing must
share are all their causal properties. For instance, if a storm wrecks the house, it
must also wreck the home. It is on this ground that Shields (1988) attempted to
refute the idea that the body, according to Aristotle, may be said to constitute the
psuche. To do so he cited Aristotle's own words to the effect that the psuche (a)
cannot be moved, (b) cannot be generated out of pre-existing stuff, (c) cannot be
divided, and (d) is not decomposable into elements. All of these, however, are
causal properties of the body: Namely, it can be moved, generated, divided, and
decomposed. If the body constituted the psuche, however, they would be causal
properties of the psuche as well. This point figures particularly crucially in the
present discussion because Shields next wrote that the most plausible form of this
sort of constitutionalism is contemporary functionalism. So it would thus seem that
Shields believes that Aristotle was not a functionalist. As I will show, however,
Shields changed his position dramatically.
Having rejected the first three options for interpreting Aristotle's view of the
relation between the psuche and body, Shields (1988) opted for the fourth one: that
the psuch§ is an immaterial substance. He was quick to point out, however, that he
does not believe Aristotle's position to have been the same as that of Descartes.
Instead of the psuche being an immaterial substance utterly independent of the
body, as Descartes maintained, Shields argued that Aristotle was a "supervenient
dualist." The definition Shields gave of supervenient dualism is very—one is
inclined to say "overly"—complicated. In essence, it comes down to the idea that
the immaterial substance of the psuche is in some (not very well-specified) way
ontologically dependent on the material substance of the body, but not necessarily
this body, or even a body very much like this one. Now, except for the claim that
this form of dependence, whatever it may be precisely, results in an immaterial
substance being produced, this position sounds very much like contemporary
functionalism. But recall that functionalism is a position that Shields had rejected
in his discussion of constitutionalism. Recall also that it strongly implies the
"transportability thesis" that psuchai can be moved from one body (biological,
computational, or what have you) to another, assuming that the new body is
suitably arranged to receive it.
Round 2: Functionalism Goes on the Attack
The question of Aristotle and computational functionalism was finally blown
wide open when Shields (1990) bluntly asserted that "Aristotle and contemporary
functionalists share deep theoretical commitments. So deep are these commit-
ments that it is fair to regard Aristotle as the first functionalist" (p. 19). This seems
to be a flat contradiction of Shields's 1988 claim that functionalism is a form a
constitutionalism and that constitutionalism is an inadequate characterization of
Aristotle's position. Gone from the 1990 article is the careful, subtle argumentation
of the 1988 article, replaced by a tendentious, quasi-historical argument that leads
to a radical new view of Aristotle. I will try to show that this view goes much too
far and is, in fact, false.
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Shields (1990, p. 20) argued that Aristotle's theory was a response to
theoretical pressures analogous to those that gave rise to contemporary functional-
ism; namely, the need to remain within the confines of materialism and the
recognition that physicalist versions of materialism are too constraining to be
plausible. He responded to Robinson's (1983) caution that Aristotle was commit-
ted to conscious phenomena that have no place in strict functionalism with the
claim that "weak" functionalism need not restrict the use of "mentalist vocabu-
lary." Not content to leave it at that, however, he continued that because Aristotle
sometimes presented definitions of mental states that do not include such
vocabulary (such as anger being the heating of the blood around the heart), "there
is reason to suppose that Aristotle accepts strong functionalism" (p. 28).
Most striking about Shields's 1990 thesis, however, was the confidence with
which he asserted that Aristotle wholly endorsed the contemporary "transportabil-
ity" thesis (viz., that psuchai can be moved from one material base to other
possibly quite different ones). His defense of this radical interpretation is based on
textual evidence that must be regarded as dubious at best.
First, in a passage in De anima (412b), Aristotle claimed that the eye is defined
by the function of seeing. Shields (1990) took this to mean that Aristotle believed
that anything that sees is an eye. In a certain sense this is true, but Aristotle gives no
hint of believing that anything other than a conventional, biological eye could
possibly see. The possibility is simply given no consideration. Shields took the
comment out of its context. Aristotle's point here was that a dead eye is, in a certain
sense, no longer an eye because it can no longer see, not that something else,
endowed with sight, would therefore be an eye endowed with psuche. This latter
possibility seems literally to have never occurred to him.
Second, in a passage in De anima (408b), Aristotle speculated that if an old
man had his eyes replaced with a younger man's eyes he would "see just as a
young man." Shields (1990) construed thisas meaning that "one could gradually
replace body parts at will with others of the right sort [italics added] . . . and still
end up with a functioning human being" (p. 21). But again, there is no indication
anywhere that Aristotle believed that anything but the conventional biological
parts could possibly be "of the right sort." There is no question of prosthetic eyes
here.
Finally, in Metaphysics, Aristotle asked the following question: "The form of
man always appears in flesh and bones and these sorts of parts; are these, therefore,
the parts of the form and account [of man]?" He then answers his own question,
"No, they are but matter, but because [man is not seen] coming to be in other
[materials], we are not able to separate them" (1037a-b). On this basis Shields
(1990) argued that, in Aristotle's mind, "nothing hinders [man's] being realized in
other ways" (p. 23). There is little to warrant this inference, however. At best
Aristotle is saying that we cannot tell if people could be realized in other materials.
At worst it is simply inconceivable to him that it could be done in any other way.
One can only be stunned at the anachronism that seems to be being perpetrated by
Shields in such interpretations. There is simply no evidence that the notion of
transportability of psuchai was ever seriously considered by Aristotle.
In a much more sober article published in 1992, Myles Burnyeat argued
against the claim that Aristotle was a functionalist in the modern sense of the term.
His argument, like many others, is premised on the belief that Aristotle, unlike
ARISTOTLE AND FUNCTIONALISM 17
contemporary functionalists, thought awareness to be a crucial part of mental
processes. Burnyeat went further than most, however, claiming, contra Sorabji
(1974), that when Aristotle said that perception results from a sense organ being
"affected" by the sensed object, he is not referring to a physiological change (e.g.,
the eye-jelly becoming red when a red thing is perceived). It is, rather, according to
Burnyeat, a case of awareness of the object being realized in the organ (e.g., the
eye "registering" red). As evidence, he turned to another of Aristotle's analogies:
that the eye perceiving is like the block of wax receiving an impression from a
stamp. Burnyeat noted that when a circular object is pressed into a square block of
wax, the block does not itself become circular; "it has registered, and now
displays, a circle" (p. 22). Thus, he continued, the eye perceiving a red object does
not itself become red; it only registers the red impression made on it. This
"registration," according to Burnyeat, is only in awareness, not in its physical
being. If so, Burnyeat went on, functionalism, which because of its essential
materialism is trying to outline an account of the physical process of perception
(among other mental activities), is at odds with the Aristotelian project.
A passage from De anima that Burnyeat (1992) himself cited seems to show
where he may have gone astray: "What then is smelling apart from being affected?
Or is smelling also awareness?" (De anima, 424b). It seems that Burnyeat tried to
drive a wedge between the physical and the conscious where Aristotle himself
resisted doing so: Perception is clearly said to be both the organ "being affected"
(presumably physiologically) and a kind of "awareness" in the organ. Contrary to
Burnyeat's implication, most contemporary functionalists would have little
difficulty with this. They would simply concede that they have no account of the
"awareness" side of the equation. Burnyeat tried to rebut this, however. He argued
that the parallel the functionalists see between Aristotle and themselves is illusory
because Aristotle took vital functions, rather than physical ones, to be basic.
According to Burnyeat the aim for Aristotle, in contrast to us, was not to explain
vital processes in terms of physical ones. Because matter was considered to be so
lowly and "insubstantial"—mere potential—it could not possibly ground an
explanation of life. Because Aristotle's conception of matter was so radically
different from the one we have inherited from the Cartesian revolution, we could
not possibly believe Aristotle's theory of psuche, nor he ours. Thus, according to
Burnyeat, he could not possibly have been a functionalist. As Burnyeat put it,
If we want to get away from Cartesian dualism, we cannot do it by traveling
backwards to Aristotle, because although Aristotle had a non-Cartesian concept of
the soul, we are stuck with a more or less Cartesian concept of the physical. To be
truly Aristotelian, we would have to stop believing that the emergence of life or
mind requires an explanation, (p. 26)
Split Decision? Functionalists Make a Concession
Nussbaum and Putnam (1992) responded directly to Burnyeat's (1992) article,
but they did not openly support Shields's radical claims. First, they repeated many
of the arguments that Nussbaum (1984) had made against Robinson (1983) with
respect to hylomorphism being a much broader metaphysical thesis that cannot be
properly evaluated when the discussion is restricted to the question of the psuche;
if you deny the importance of matter with respect to the psuche then you are
committed to denying it with respect to, say, chairs as well. Second, with this
18 GREEN
argument in hand, Nussbaum and Putnam (1992) denied outright that Aristotle
considered life to be essentially inexplicable:
When Aristotle argues against materialistic reductionism he could not possibly be
relying on the "primitive" nature of intentionality, or on the inexplicable character
of life and mind—for the simple reason that his defence of form is meant to apply
. . . across the board to all substances, whether or not they have "mind" or even life,
(p. 30)
Nussbaum and Putnam then presented textual support for the claim that Aristotle
was crucially concerned with the physiological side of the psychological equation,
not only from De anima but also from De motu animalium and De sensu. They
regard it as "especially unwise to regard [De anima} as the central text when
discussing this particular problem" (p. 37) because Aristotle himself said in De
anima he is restricting himself to "structural" matters with respect to the psuche,
issues of the physiological base having been discussed in other works. Thus, absence of
evidence should, here especially, not be interpreted as evidence of absence.
Finally Nussbaum and Putnam (1992) got down to the matter of whether or not
Aristotle should be characterized as a functionalist. Aristotle rejects Democritean
reductive materialism and Platonic idealism in favor of a position in which the
organization, or form, of matter is key to understanding the nature of a thing, even
when that "thing" is the psuche. Certainly, however, the kind of organization
Aristotle had in mind was not computational. Of course, this was not made very
clear when Putnam made his famous quip about functionalists having the same
interest in form as Aristotle in the 1970s. It all seemed much more obvious to them
in 1992, however, by which time Putnam (1988) had repudiated computational
functionalism. This is a much weaker notion of what counts as functionalism than
is found in Shields's (1990) article, and it makes Aristotle a distant cousin of
contemporary functionalists, many times removed, rather than a direct lineal
ancestor.
Conclusion
Nussbaum and Putnam (1992) have, I think, gotten things approximately right
here (though there is an attempt to assimilate Aristotle to Wittgenstein near the end
of the piece of which one should be deeply suspicious). Even so, I believe they
read Aristotle a little too liberally. Contemporary functionalism puts virtually no
restriction on what kind of matter might underpin a particular computational state,
save that it be complex enough to be able to realize the computational state in
question. Aristotle, I think, would have had no truck with this. He was quite clear
that the only material objectthat has the potential to be a living thing is a
(biological) body. In fact, he went so far as to say that only a living body has this
potential (and, thus, that this potential has already been actualized; De anima,
412b). Even dead bodies, it would seem, no longer have the potential for life.
Now, if Aristotle was not the sort of fellow who could envision bringing a dead
body back to life (i.e., rejecting the possibility that after death it retains within it a
potential for life that could be "re-actualized" by the "application" of psuche), it
would seem a fair bet that neither was he the sort who would attribute that potential
to computers (or thermostats, or liquid running through plastic tubes, or
assemblages of beer cans and string, to use a few of contemporary cognitive
ARISTOTLE AND FUNCTIONALISM 19
scientists' more fanciful suggestions). Perhaps it is fair to say that he was a
functionalist in the general sense that he believed the psuche to be the functioning
of a particular body, but it seems unlikely that he would have endorsed even a
limited form of the transportability thesis (except perhaps in the limiting case of an
identical clone down to, say, the molecular level). The kind of life a body has is, for
Aristotle, too intimately connected to the kind of body it has for it to be shifted
around willy-nilly. In fact, he was quite explicit about this in the oft-ignored Book I
of De anima:
[Other philosophers of the psuche] do not try to determine anything about the
nature of that which is to receive [the psuche}, as if it were possible, as in the
Pythagorean myths, that any psuche could be clothed in any body—an absurd view,
since it is apparent that each body has its own particular form and shape. (407b,
translation from Everson, 1995)
If Aristotle is right about this, then it is, perhaps, Pythagoras we should be looking
to as a precursor to the functionalists, not Aristotle.
In summary, then, Aristotle might be considered to have been a functionalist in
the very general sense that he did not believe it possible to explain life and mind in
reductive physiological terms. His definitions of vital processes, such as percep-
tion, are functional. There is no hint, however, that he believed, even in principle,
that these functions might be "lifted out" of the body in which they are found and
moved or reproduced somewhere else. In this Aristotle is at odds with contempo-
rary functionalism. That is, his position is distant enough from that advocated by
contemporary functionalists that it seems more misleading to include him among
them than to regard his theory as something apart—something sui generis, as
Sorabji (1974) called it. The temptation to assimilate it to our current accounts,
partly in an effort to gain for them an air of ancient authority, is ever present. As far
back as the 6th century John Philoponus noted that "commentators on Aristotle are
inclined to try to attribute to him doctrines which they themselves think sound"
(ca. 550/1991, p. 12).10 Ancient as the temptation is, it is one that we should resist.
If we can, we may find that Aristotle's account of the psuche is a theory from which
we can still learn a thing or two.
IOI would like to thank Simon Kemp for bringing this passage to my attention.
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Received November 13, 1996
Revision received March 19, 1997
Accepted May 5, 1997 •