Faculties of the soul

The faculties of the soul are the individual characteristics attributed to a soul. There have been different attempts to define them over the centuries.

Plato defined the faculties of the soul in terms of a three-fold division: the intellect (noûs), the nobler affections (thumós), and the appetites or passions (epithumetikón)^[1] Aristotle also made a three-fold division of natural faculties, into vegetative, appetitive and rational elements,^[2] though he later distinguished further divisions in the rational faculty, such as the faculty of judgement and that of cleverness (deinotes).^[3]

Islamic philosophers continued his three-fold division;^[4] but later Scholastic philosophers defined five groups of faculties:^[5]

• dunámeis, the "vegetative" faculty (threptikón), concerned with the maintenance and development of organic life
• the appetite (oretikón), or the tendency to any good
• the faculty of sense perception (aisthetikón)
• the "locomotive" faculty (kinetikón), which presides over the various bodily movements
• reason (dianoetikón)

John Calvin opposed the scholastic philosophers, favoring a two-fold division of the soul, consisting of intellect and of will.^[6]

The secularisation of the Age of Enlightenment produced a faculty psychology of different but inherent mental powers such as intelligence or memory, distinct (as in Aristotelianism) from the acquired habits.^[7]

• 'Aql (rational faculty in Islamic philosophy)
• Jerry Fodor
• Phrenology
• Psychology
• Rational animal
• Thomism
• Trichotomy

• Neuroscience and Thomas Aquinas

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