Abstract

Aristotle claims that the soul in animals is defined by two faculties: the discriminative belonging to sense and thought, and the faculty of initiating movement. He insists that the part which initiates movement, the desiring part, is not separable from the other parts and faculties of the soul; to think of this as a separable part is to conceal its essential connexions with other psychic states in a teleological explanation of behaviour. His reasons for insisting on this indicate his guiding assumptions about the nature of psychic states.