Aristotle’s Functonalism: Psyche’s Relevance to Contemporary Philosophy of Mind

While functionalism often attributes its roots to Aristotle’s On the Soul, contemporary philosophers of mind have left behind crucial features of Aristotle’s philosophy by losing his distinction between mind and soul. I propose a revision to our present concept of mind, instead situating it as an aspect of the Aristotelian concept of soul, which allows for a more robust account of functionalism that encompasses the entirety of the human being as a system of demonstrative, functional capacities. I argue that Aristotle’s applied theory of the nature of souls offers greater fecundity to discourse in philosophy of mind, specifically in discussions of the possibility of strong artificial intelligence, the contemporary movement across disciplines towards the externalized concept of mind, and in ameliorating some of the insurmountable critiques of alternate theories of mind. Furthermore, a thoroughly Aristotelian form of functionalism provides a possible solution the problem of holism, one of the major predicaments contemporary functionalism faces. The Aristotelian view of the mind qua soul is to be contrasted with Cartesian dualism as well as reductive materialism, as those are two historically-dominating theories of mind that have defined the way in which philosophers consider the mind.