  Of the Neoplatonists, John Philoponus, whose commentary was highly influential throughout the Greek Middle Ages though virtually unknown in the Latin West, held that Aristotle agreed with Plato that of the three kinds of soul (1) the vegetative soul alone is wholly inseparable from the body; (2) the irrational soul (comprising the faculties of imagination and sense-perception as well as appetite and desire) is separable from the gross body, though inseparable from the pneuma, and thus mortal; and (3) the rational soul, the substance of which transcends all body, but some of whose activities are bound up with the human body (as those of the pilot are bound up with the ship), is wholly separable and thus immortal. It seems clear that “rational soul” in this context is synonymous with “intellect” in the Aristotelian texts. Ps.-Simplicius (= ?Priscian) takes a similar view, but in Ps.-Philoponus’ (= ?Stephanus’) commentary, the scheme is altered so as to allow immortality even to the two perishable kinds of soul (“for they perish not in their capacity of soul but in their capacity of being in a body”). Thus Plato’s dictum that “all soul is immortal” (Phdr. 245c6) according to Ps.-Philoponus holds true, even though intellect is the only part of soul which is immortal and eternal, as Aristotle says. The interpretation of Phaedrus 245c6 as referring to “both rational, irrational and vegetative” soul is ascribed to Numenius (f. 47) and repudiated by Philoponus (In DA 9.35–10.1). What all the Neoplatonic commentators took for granted is that the productive intellect introduced in De anima 3.5 is part of the individual human soul. This must be so, since in their view the De anima is a treatise on the human soul.