Body and Soul

Body and Soul: Essays on Aristotle's Hylomorphism is one of three volumes collecting previously published essays by Jennifer Whiting. This volume contains two sets of essays, one centered on Aristotle's account of an animal's body as standing to its soul as matter (hule) to form (morphe), the other exploring Aristotle's conception of practical reason as the proper form of human desire. In the first set Whiting presents Aristotle's conception of the soul as the form and essence of an organic (and so living) body as part of his solution to Presocratic puzzles about whether there is a real (and not simply conventional) distinction between the coming-to-be (or passing-away) of an individual substance and what is merely the alteration or rearrangement of pre-existing stuffs. The solution also involves taking each individual animal within a species to have its own numerically distinct