The ontological foundations of Aristotle's account of the soul

The purpose of this thesis is to critically examine the relation between Aristotle's account of being and his account of the soul and its faculties. The concepts with which Aristotle explains the soul and its parts are developed in his ontology, and without adequately understanding these concepts it is not possible to fully understand Aristotle's account of the soul. Even though Aristotle's ontology and parts of his psychology seem to be closely knit, however, I try to show that the relation between the two is fraught with questions that on the face of it have no easy answers. Namely, according to Aristotelian ontology there should be some underlying subject for each quality, but in the case of perception it is not clear what serves as the underlying subject for sensible qualities. Similarly, it seems to have been difficult for Aristotle to account for the disanalogy between artifacts and living beings, a sign of which is that he provides us with mutually incompatible alternatives for the unique status of living beings, none of which is easy to integrate into Aristotle's philosophy as a whole. These give us reason to believe, I argue, that the relation between Aristotle's ontology and parts of his psychology is more problematic than it might first appear.