Recovery of the Soul: An Aristotelian Essay on Self-fulfilment

Tay Wilson is an associate professor of psychology at Laurentian
University.

Rankin’s powerful book, which is an attempt to retrieve the actual
thrust of some of Aristotle’s notions from centuries of distortion and
to modify them so as to produce a model useful for modern philosophical
enquiry, is the sort of work one far too seldom encounters in today’s
rush to publish. In its full sentences and rich vocabulary, the work
reveals itself as a labor of love. In four chapters, Rankin establishes
the usefulness of Aristotelian doctrine for a modified physicalist like
himself who does not identify the mind with any kind of substance but
rather analytically with various aspects of the causal modalities held
by virtue of having certain organs. He describes Aristotle as the
archetypical approximator in his concepts, coming close to the truth yet
often leading far astray. He carefully points out what seems appropriate
to attribute to Aristotle regarding such key concepts as category
distinctions (e.g. substance, quality, quantity, relation, matter, and
form). Rankin then proposes, describes, and criticizes two main
principles of Aristotle’s metaphysical enquiry (the path to
enlightenment, consisting of going from what is more knowable to us to
what is more knowable to nature, and the integrative program, in which
various theoretical sciences are subordinated to first-cause philosophy)
and four resulting doctrinal principles (reificatory—particular
sensible substances owe their being or thinghood to form, modal
identity—the soul is a power; psychocentric—the soul is the form of
forms; and axiological—the ultimate source of nonarbitrary thinghood
is the highest good).

In Chapter 6, Rankin presents his proposed rectification of
Aristotle’s doctrines, a central concept of which (very loosely
expressed) is that the self-identity of particulars through time depends
ontologically and epistemologically on possession of causal potency.
Whether an approach to self-identity such as this would release us from
the tedium and unfruitfulness of approaches to self-identity through
empirical autocorrelation of myriads of traits requires close study of
Rankin’s work, but the study appears to be well merited.