Aristotle’s use of entelekheia to describe the soul tells us how important he thought this was, for the word is partly derived from telos, an end or goal. This conception, too, runs deep – into his metaphysics. The soul, he says, is ‘an entity [ousia] in the sense of a definition [logos]’. By this he means that a living thing’s soul is the sum of its functional features. If an eye were a living creature, he says, then its soul would be vision. He is so committed to the idea that functional features define a creature (or an organ), rather than the stuff it’s made of, that he even says that if
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