ABSTRACT
Students of Aristotle are familiar with his thesis that soul is the form of the body. In the De Anima Aristotle explains this further by claiming that the soul is the “perfection” or entelechia of the body. Plotinus was critical of the Aristotelian doctrine of soul, since it seemed to imply that soul was either inseparable from body, or at least properly conceived of as the form of the body. The division of the soul into parts or faculties gives him a way to account for this twofold nature of soul. He holds that the soul is “bodily” or “in” body with regards to some of its faculties, in particular those of the nutritive and animal or sensitive soul. The similarity of the phrasing in the two Arabic texts makes it extremely unlikely that both were drawing independently on the text of the Enneads.
