Mind and Body Across Time and Discipline

The two central ways of conceptualizing psyche–soma relations in the western tradition were, and still are, the Platonic and the Aristotelian paradigms. According to Plato, a human being is a combination of two distinct substances, a mortal body and an immortal soul. According to Aristotle, a human being is a unified substance: the soul (psuche) is the form of the body, and to describe the soul is to describe the characteristic powers of human beings, just as describing the soul of a pine tree is to describe the characteristic powers of pine trees. Human beings are seen on a continuous scale with all other beings, and to say they have a rational soul roughly means that they have a linguistic capacity that other beings lack