Reply #371: I guess you hate context - below is a few more words stolen from the [View All]

[papau]

internet http://www.anselm.edu/homepage/dbanach/arist.htm

God, for Aristotle, plays the role of both the eternal cause of all motion and the ultimate final cause of all motion and change. Motion is eternal for Aristotle; it is impossible that there could be a first motion, for this would require another motion to get it started. Nothing moves without a cause for Aristotle. The cause of this eternal motion cannot be simply another motion in the chain, it must itself be eternal and it must be unmoved itself. If it were not eternal it could not explain eternal motion. If it were moved itself, this motion itself would require another explanation. The eternal motion of nature requires an eternal unmoved mover or cause. This unmoved eternal mover is God for Aristotle.

God is also the ultimate final cause of all things. All things tend towards God as their final state or goal, as a lover moves toward his beloved. It is the desire for this ultimate goal or fulfillment that fuels each object's development towards its own particular goal. God is seen as perfect activity or pure form; it is thought thinking itself.
:-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-)
For Aristotle, the soul is the form of a living creature. It is the arrangement of the matter of its body so as to allow it to carry on all of the peculiar functions of living organisms. He identifies five such distinctive powers of the soul, all of which are not found in all organisms: (1) The nutritive: This is the power living beings have to grow and take in nourishment. (2) The appetitive: This is the power of desiring. (3) The sensory: This is the power of perceiving things with the senses. (4) The locomotive: This is the ability to move. (5) The reasoning.

These are the different functions which the souls of different organisms fulfill. They are not parts of the soul, but different powers which organisms organized by a soul or form of the right type can exercise.

And the original:

http://www.msu.org/e&r/content_e&r/texts/aristotle/arist_text18.htm

Metaphysics, Book XII, Chapter 9:
32. The nature of the divine thought involves certain problems; for while thought is held to be the most divine of things observed by us, the question how it must be situated in order to have that character involves difficulties. For if it thinks of nothing, what is there here of dignity? It is just like one who sleeps. And if it thinks, but this depends on something else, then (since that which is its substance is not the act of thinking, but a potency) it cannot be the best substance; for it is through thinking that its value belongs to it. Further, whether its substance is the faculty of thought or the act of thinking, what does it think of? Either of itself or of something else; and if of something else, either of the same thing always or of something different. Does it matter, then, or not, whether it thinks of the good or of any chance thing? Are there not some things about which it is incredible that it should think? Evidently, then, it thinks of that which is most divine and precious, and it does not change; for change would be change for the worse, and this would be already a movement. First, then, if 'thought' is not the act of thinking but a potency, it would be reasonable to suppose that the continuity of its thinking is wearisome to it. Secondly, there would evidently be something else more precious than thought, viz. that which is thought of. For both thinking and the act of thought will belong even to one who thinks of the worst thing in the world, so that if this ought to be avoided (and it ought, for there are even some things which it is better not to see than to see), the act of thinking cannot be the best of things. Therefore it must be of itself that the divine thought thinks (since it is the most excellent of things), and its thinking is a thinking on thinking.

33. But evidently knowledge and perception and opinion and understanding have always something else as their object, and themselves only by the way. Further, if thinking and being thought of are different, in respect of which does goodness belong to thought? For to he an act of thinking and to he an object of thought are not the same thing. We answer that in some cases the knowledge is the object. In the productive sciences it is the substance or essence of the object, matter omitted, and in the theoretical sciences the definition or the act of thinking is the object. Since, then, thought and the object of thought are not different in the case of things that have not matter, the divine thought and its object will be the same, i.e. the thinking will be one with the object of its thought.

34. A further question is left-whether the object of the divine thought is composite; for if it were, thought would change in passing from part to part of the whole. We answer that everything which has not matter is indivisible-as human thought, or rather the thought of composite beings, is in a certain period of time (for it does not possess the good at this moment or at that, but its best, being something different from it, is attained only in a whole period of time), so throughout eternity is the thought which has itself for its object.