ABSTRACT
One of the most salient and far-reaching differences between modern “philosophy of mind” and medieval “philosophical psychology” has to do with the relation between soul and mind. The soul is not merely a thinking thing, but the principle that accounts for the whole range of functions associated with life: nutrition, growth, reproduction, locomotion, sensation, imagination, memory, and thinking. The soul’s vegetative and sensitive powers obviously require specific bodily organs to perform their operations. Hence, these powers have the whole human composite, soul and body together, as their substratum. In John Buridan’s account of the powers of the soul, the intellective powers are considered to function independently from the body and its organs, just as Thomas Aquinas had argued. In Aquinas’s view, all powers of the soul naturally emanate from the soul’s essence, even though the vegetative and sensitive powers have the whole human composite as their substratum, while the intellective powers inhere in the soul’s essence.
