De Anima: Its Agenda and Its Recent Interpreters</a></li>
Amelie Rorty
In Nussbaum and Rorty, eds., Essays on Aristotle's De Anima. Clarendon, 1992.

"The co-operation of the causal dimension of psuche begins with the final cause: the preservation and maintenance of a specific form (eidos) or type of life, such as its being a ruminant or a human. These two - the final and formal causes - taken together, set constraints on the kind of matter - the kind of physical body - in which this form of life can be effectively, actively realized. And this in turn sets further constraints on the details of the material [PSA: and psychological] organization of that type of animal, so that it effectively promotes the motions required for leading its kind of life." (RORTY, p. 9)

"[W]e might speculate that thinking could nevertheless so change the whole person - as having realized his highest potentiality - that he became visibly kalos kagathos." (RORTY, p. 9)

"An organism does not have life as one of its attributes, along with its size and shape. Rather, the life and soul of a certain kind of body consists in its being active in a certain way, engaged in those activities that constitute its being the sort of thing it is." (RORTY, p. 9)

"Aristotle does not draw a sharp distinction between those vital activities which, like self-nourishment, just keep an organism alive, and those that express the nature of the thing, that constitute a way of living." (RORTY, p. 10)

With reference to 435b20, Rorty says: "Psychological activities are individuated and identified not only by their contributions to sheer maintenance for survival, but also by their contributions to the organism's realizing the potentialities of its species." (RORTY, p. 10)

"Because humans are distinguished from other animals by their dianoia, by their capacities for thought and reasoning (415a8-11, 413b13), there is a question of how, if at all, thinking (and its objects) is integrated with other basic human activities and their proper objects." (RORTY, p. 10)

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