Aristotle Implicitly Transferred: Boethius‘ Conception of the Soul

It is well known that Boethius couldn’t implement his ambitious intention to translate and comment all texts of Plato and Aristotle. He got bogged down in the detailed work on the Organon und his untimely death prevented him from devoting himself to further Aristotelian and Platonic texts. Therefore there is no explicit translation of or commentary on Aristotle's de anima by Boethius. Nevertheless we can find numerous paragraphs which describe or reflect theories of soul in his commentaries on the Organon as well as in his ethical magnum opus, the Consolation of Philosophy. It is the goal of this paper to determine the different functions of some of these passages about the faculties of the soul and to prove whether his implicitly transferred conception of the soul has an Aristotelian origin. Finally I will point out the characteristics of the implicit transfer of knowledge in this particular context.