Kolokvia k antické filosofii

This paper looks at a problem that confronts dualist positions in the philosophy of mind: if the mind is incorporeal, why is it affected by bodily conditions like illness, drunkenness, and old age? There is a passage in Aristotle’s On the Soul 1.4 that touches on this question. It suggests that people decline in their capacity for rational thought as they age, which he explains in terms of an “internal element” being impaired, apparently meaning a bodily organ. Because this sheds doubt on the dualist reading of Aristotle popular in late antiquity, his commentators tried to defuse the passage. They noted that until “extreme old age,” people actually increase in their intellectual capacity as the body declines, turning the point into an argument for dualism. Yet something needs to be said to explain senility among the very old. This debate was then picked up by Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna, d. 1037) in the Islamic world: again here we will consider how his commentators reacted to his own argument that the intellect and body are independent from one another in terms of their strength and capacity.