Aither is a double-blind peer review, Open Access online academic journal. It is indexed at ERIH+ and Scopus. It is published by the Faculty of Arts of the Palackż University in Olomouc in cooperation with the Philosophical Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. It comes out twice a year. Every second issue is international and contains foreign-language articles (mainly in English, but also in German and French). The journal is registered under the number ISSN 1803-7860.

Aither 34/2025 (International issue no. 13):4-23 | DOI: 10.5507/aither.2026.002

The Unity of the Human Soul: A Dimensional Reading of DA II.3

Pavol Labuda
Palackż University Olomouc


This paper offers a new interpretation of the unity of the human soul’s parts in De Anima II.3, drawing on the mathematical notion of dimension. Dimensionality, understood as an intrinsic property that parameterises a system’s complexity by the number of its independent yet ordered parameters, provides a suitable framework for explaining the unity of the tripartite human soul. The nutritive, the perceptual, and the intellectual parts emerge as three definitionally distinct yet operationally ordered dimensions of a human being. Though anachronistic, this dimensional account is philosophically fruitful: it effectively unifies three structural features of the soul’s parts – serial order, potential containment, and teleological subordination – identified in recent scholarship (Johansen 2012, 2014; Corcilius 2015, 2023, 2025).

Received: November 18, 2025; Revised: January 7, 2026; Accepted: January 26, 2026; Published: December 31, 2025  Show citation

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Labuda, P. (2025). The Unity of the Human Soul: A Dimensional Reading of DA II.3. Aither, 17(34), 4-23. doi: 10.5507/aither.2026.002
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