some of his most original ideas, in the form of a critique aimed at Aristotelian views on the human soul. Here he’s carrying on a discussion that began in earlier thirteenth-century writings, concerning Aristotle’s definition of soul as the form of the body (see Chapter 24). In addition to the obvious difficulty that this could imply the soul’s dependence on the body, thus precluding its immortality, there was a puzzle about whether we can really understand humans to have only one form. Olivi’s contemporary Thomas Aquinas insisted that this is exactly what we should think. For Aquinas, the
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