On the Immortality of the Soul

What Aristotle thought concerning the immortality of the soul, even by the testimony of his Greek interpreters.

...[he] lived and grew blind in the darkness of superstitions; and he walked about in a kind of racecourse, as it were, of sublunary things, more multifaceted and winding than that twelve-fold turn in Pindar. We, through our religion, both proceed rightly and are illuminated by the supercelestial rays of divine truth; concerning which matter, if God grants it, we are going to write in dedicated volumes. But let us pursue what is now at hand. First of all, it is sufficiently clear that Aristotle, in the first book On the Soul, brought forward his own definition in general and rejected those of others. In the second, he discoursed on its sensory powers. In the third, he disputed concerning the intellective power. In the vestibule of which, so to speak—if we follow that division of the books which we established at the beginning—he began to reveal immortality by the force of a single word, when he cited the intellective power itself by the name not of a "part" [pars], but of a "particle" [particula], that is, in Greek, μορίου. For if he had called it a disjoined part, some might have suspected it to be a part [in the physical sense]. For that famous distinction concerning the parts of the soul, and not its particles, existed even before Aristotle, when certain men assigned one part to the midriff, another to the head, and another to another limb as if separated; which error is not easily committed with the name "particle," as it is accustomed to inhere and not to exist as something separated. This matter we mentioned among the beginnings of this commentary. But since he had said that the soul understands and becomes prudent by that particle, and since the name of "intellect" was considered multifaceted, Aristotle affirmed through these words that he would dispute concerning that by which the soul understands, and which he had previously called a particle of the soul: "But I mean the intellect by which the soul reasons and judges," thus in Greek, λέγω δὲ νοῦν ᾧ διανοέιται καὶ ὑπολαμβάνει ἡ ψυχή. Then he showed that the intellect is the recipient of species, and how it differs from sense since it is not mixed—which was pleasing to Anaxagoras; and for that reason, it could know all things, because it was impassive, because it would become stronger by understanding, and would not grow weary or waste away like a sense prostrated by a more vehement sensible object; therefore, it both was and would be held to be separable. Up to this point, all the Greek Peripatetics whose books I have read have not wandered. Only Alexander of Aphrodisias deceived both himself and others, and as Philoponus says, [he referred] those three words—unmixed, impassive, separable—to the soul's

Against Alexander. Philoponus