The immortality of the soul is one of the oldest tropes in the history of philosophy and one that gained significant momentum in 16th-century Europe. But what came before Pietro Pomponazzi and his contemporaries? Through examination of four neglected but central figures, Joanna Papiernik uncovers the rich and varied nature of the afterlife debate in 15th-century Italy. By engaging with old prints, manuscripts and other archival material, this book reveals just how much interest there was in the question (...) of immortality before the 16th-century boom in Aristotelian translations. In particular, Papiernik sheds light on the treatises of Agostino Dati, Leonardo Nogarola, Antonio degli Agli and Giovanni Canali, all of which have until now been overlooked in modern scholarship. From Dati's critiques of ancient and existing positions to Agli's study of immortality and its relation to the metaphysics of light, this volume investigates not only how wide-ranging the debate was but also the important impact it had on later philosophical thinking. Deftly combining close reading with a broad intellectual survey, and including two editions of unpublished primary texts, Philosophies of the Afterlife in the Early Italian Renaissance provides a crucial insight into the development of early Renaissance Platonism and philosophy of religion. (shrink)

Politics of the Soul in the Alcibiades is an important book that develops an interpretation of the essence of the political (politics of the soul) as eluci-dated through the analysis of Socrates' practice of "self-cultivation" or care for the soul. In the process, it also confronts the issue of the problematic relationship between philosopher and statesman that is present to Plato's dialogues. The analysis contributes the following to ongoing scholarship: (1) It offers a detailed and critical discussion (...) of the neglected and oft times ma-ligned dialogue the Alcibiades; (2) It contributes to the reinterpretation of the traditional view of the Socratic method arguing for elenchus as an expres-sion and instantiation of the normative politics it seeks to define; (3) In de-veloping a unique account of Socratic participatory democracy, it has the subordinate aim of demonstrating the value of Socratic practice over our own impoverished practice of impoverished political discourse. The text is suita-ble for scholars working in the fields of philosophy, ancient Greek philoso-phy, and classical studies. It would serve as an excellent secondary text for graduate level courses reading Plato's dialogues because it contains an ex-tensive and sustained discussion of Socratic method. In addition to graduate students, it is appropriate for college students pursuing courses in philoso-phy in their 3rd or 4th year of study. Laypersons who are intellectually curious about philosophy, particularly those interested in Socrates, will be attracted to this text. (shrink)

This paper is an English translation of "Contemporary Philosophy on Immortality of the Soul" by Kazimierz Twardowski.

One of the most important paradigm shifts in the history of Greek philosophy was the ‘rediscovery’ of transcendence in the movement of Intermediate Platonism. Less than a century before the birth of Hellenism, Plato had advocated an intentional preoccupation with the life of the mind / soul, encouraging the individual to avoid being entrapped in the material limitations of life and instead discover its transcendental dimension. The conquest of Athens by the Macedonians, followed by the invasion of the (...) Orient by Alexander the Great, set in motion sociological and cultural changes that challenged the relevance of Platonic philosophy. The transcendental vision of Platonism left the individual still struggling to find happiness in the world created by Alexander the Great. This was the context in which the schools the of Cynicism, Stoicism, Epicureanism and Skepticism challenged Platonism with their call to happiness in this world and by means of the Hellenistic dominance and the rise of Roman supremacy stirred a renewed spiritual and philosophical effort to rediscover the world beyond; that is, the transcendental world of Plato. This was Middle Platonism and the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria was one of its most prolific writers. In this paper, we will examine the concept of the soul in the writings of Philo, with an emphasis on the role that the soul plays in the act of approaching God through the means of the external / material cult. Philo offers a complex vision of the soul, one that remains critically relevant to understanding the Greek, Jewish, and Christian thought that emerged after Philo. (shrink)

The Archaeology of the Soul is a testimony to the extraordinary scope of Seth Benardete's thought. Some essays concern particular authors or texts; others range more broadly and are thematic. Some deal explicitly with philosophy; others deal with epic, lyric, and tragic poetry. Some of these authors are Greek, some Roman, and still others are contemporaries writing about antiquity. All of these essays, however, are informed by an underlying vision, which is a reflection of Benardete's life-long engagement with (...) one thinker in particular -Plato. The Platonic dialogue presented Benardete with the most vivid case of that periagoge, or turn-around, that he found to be the sign of all philosophic thinking and that is the signature as well of his own interpretations not only of Plato but also of other thinkers. The core of The Archaeology of the Soul consists of a set of essays Benardete produced in his last years; the collection provides at the same time an entry into that world through some of Benardete's earliest articles on Plato and on Greek poetry. Benardete's earlier path of close textual analysis always reflected his intimate philosophic dialogue with the thinker in whose work he was immersed; later, he drew on resources of erudition acquired over a lifetime to present a broader picture, on a theme like the dialectics of eros or freedom and necessity. In his late work Benardete was not only engaged in putting together in more general form material he had worked out earlier; he was still on the trail of new discoveries, above all, by extending his Platonic understanding of philosophy to pre- and post-Platonic thinkers. He had become increasingly aware that the discovery of philosophy through the "Socratic turn" was really the rediscovery of an understanding already present in some form in the Greek poets and that awareness guided his last years of study of the pre-Socratic philosophers. According to the standard view of the history of Greek philosophy, the Socratic turn, with its focus on "the human things," marks a point of radical change in philosophy's history. Benardete's late studies led him to the conclusion that the kind of pivotal reorientation thought to be Socratic is in fact the mark of what it means to think philosophically, and Heraclitus or Parmenides is a genuine philosophic thinker precisely to the extent that a Socratic turn can be found in some form within his own thought. At the same time that he was pursuing a track backward, from Plato to the poets and pre-Socratic philosophers, Benardete was also proceeding on a forward path, from Plato to the Latin writers, who adopt the Platonic way of thinking with full understanding of what it means to be "post-Platonic." As the essays collected in this volume demonstrate, the Platonic notion of a "second sailing" gave Benardete a key to the relation between Greek and Latin thought - and with that to a comprehensive under-standing of antiquity-as it did to the relation between poetry and philosophy as such. Ronna Burger teaches philosophy at Tulane University; she is the author of The Phaedo: A Platonic Labyrinth from St. Augustine's Press and Aristotle's Dialogue with Socrates: On the Nicomachean Ethics. Michael Davis teaches philosophy at Sarah Lawrence College; he authored Wonderlust: Ruminations on Liberal Education, The Poetry of Philosophy: On Aristotle's Poetics and, with Seth Benardete, translated Aristotle - On Poetics, both from St. Augustine's Press. Burger and Davis collaborated on editing Seth Benardete's Achilles and Hector: The Homeric Hero. (shrink)

The paper aims to trace the distinctive character of the talk of the soul and to disentangle it from the talk of the mind. The key context will be the way in which we talk about souls that are ailing. As a point of departure, I use the later Wittgenstein's notion of the soul as anti-dualist and anti-substantive, which brings it close to Dennett's or Davidson's philosophy of mind, but which Wittgensteinian ethicists have elaborated upon as concerned (...) with matters of good and evil, and beauty. In relation to these concerns, the sense of the ailing soul is different from issues relating to mental health. I then discuss cases of ailments of the soul that would be misleading to analyse as matters of mental health (issues): addiction, racism, and environmental grief. I conclude with a plea for maintaining the talk of the soul as helpful for making sense of existential or beauty- or morality-related ailments, yet as something that does not necessarily subscribe to any doctrine of the soul as a substance. In support, I also use arguments from the spheres of eco-theology and public theology. (shrink)

_Time and the Science of the Soul in Early Modern Philosophy_ traces the complex and productive connections established between time and the soul from late Aristotelianism to the natural and political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes and René Descartes.

The English Catholic philosopher Sir Kenelm Digby (1603–1665) has enjoyed a recent spate of scholarly attention as a prodigious traveller, political figure, and man of diverse intellectual interests. This article contributes to this scholarship by assessing the commentary on salvation at the heart of Digby’s philosophy of the soul and the historical contexts in which it was produced. It argues that Digby’s thinking on the soul was a meditation on the worldly interactions a Catholic must undertake or (...) avoid in order to achieve salvation. As such, our intellectual historical understanding of Digby is much improved when he is viewed as a scholar who constructed an identity as a thinker adept at advising others on the correct path to beatitude. This article also makes the broader argument for salvation as an important conceptual tool for early modern intellectual historians wishing to accurately map the complex relationship between theology, scholarly argument, and scholarly ambition in the seventeenth century. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:KNOWLEDGE OF THE SOUL YVES R. SIMON Translated by Ralph Nelson University of Windsor Windsor, Ontario Translator's Forword IN THE RECENTLY published The Definition of Moral Virtue, based on 1leotures Yves Simon gave a:t the University of Chicago in 1957, there is a passage which helps us understand 1the place this essay has in Simon's work as 'a philosopher. Let us admit that psychology is a very poorly (...) organized discipline and one whose disorderliness does not seem to be diminishing. Were I a little young·er, I would consider dedicating my life to improving the situation, because the science of the soul is so important for morality. But sometimes I wonder if it is not already too late.1 1 This essay on the epistemological nature of psychology, which appeared in Gants du Ciel in 1944, pmvides an intmdiuction to that project envisaged hy Simon hut never compJeted. It is a starting point. It is not a constitutive epistemology rin cthe Kantian sense ibut,a i!.'eftective one, that is, it surveys the state of the discipline in order to clarify the pl'oblems, eliminate false 1 leads, identify the areas requiring further development, and, finally, point out the interconnections. Simon's 1 essay is timely in the 1 ahsence of an undisputed and unified science of psychology commanding 1 the support of competent persons. lit is not dated,,because he 1 sticks to tihe issues and does not dwell on personalities. There are no references to 1 Yves R. Simon, The Definition of Morai Virtue, ed. Vukan Kuic (New York: Fordham University Press, 1989), p. 94. ~69 270 YVES R. SIMON twentieth century psychologists. However, it is easy to supply topical references to illustrate a point, whether it be Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget, or B. F. Skinner. Take, for instance, the attack on philosophical psychology. In Freud's case, there was a constant effort completely to divorce ps;)"chology from philosophy, which he distrusted, even though some would say that there is an implicit or disguised Freudian philosophy. In Piaget's case, there is a vehement polemic against philosophicaJ psychology in his hook Sagesse et illusions de la philosophie (1965). It seems quite clear that Piaget would not acknowledge any positive contribution to psychology in the writings of Maine de Biran, Bergson, Sartre, or Th1erleau-Ponty, to mention just the better known. Philosophy might be "wisdom" in Piaget's sense, but that is far from being a compliment since" wisdom" is not" science." In the case of B. F. Skinner and his efforts to go beyond freedom.and dignity, there is a perfect exemplification of that technology extended to man so aptly described by Simon. Yet in spite of scientistic confidence, the identity crisis psychology persists. If one is neither to reject philosophical psychology out of hand nor to dismiss the claims of positive psychology, 1 it is necessary to rmak:e 1 appropria,te distinctions, such as the distinction between theoretical and practical psychology and between applied psychology and moml psychology. Yet, having done that, Simon shows rbhat an analysis of individual cases reveals that 1 applied and moral psychology a:re complementary, Simon's contribution to the task of "improving the situation,,. ·did not end with the epistemological essay. It is important to note his treatment of moral psychology. I recall years ago reading St. Thomas's examination of human acts in the Summa Theologica. 1and thinking tha:t this was a kind of moral ps;)"ohology. However, that was not then, nor is it now, a.·Common term. In Rarwls's A Theory of Justice, there is a section on moi'al psychology which seems to be about moral learning. A recent study by an English philosopher, N. J. H. Dent, The Moral Psychology of the Vi1·tues (1984), seems KNOWLEDGE OF THE SOUL move to the point; following G. E. M. Anseombe and analytic phifosophy, it examines psycho1ogical concepts particularly relevrant to ethics. Now Simon had not only talked about morial psychology but also developed a number of concepts which are characteristic of it, such as the notion of practical reasoning, free ohoice, knowledge by inolination, and virtue (based on the important... (shrink)

Celebrated yoga teacher and activist Seane Corn shares pivotal accounts of her life with raw honesty—enriched with in-depth spiritual teachings—to help us heal, evolve, and change the world “My first lessons in spirituality and yoga had nothing to do with a mat, but everything to do with waking up. They included angels, seeing God, and being in Heaven. But, believe me, not the way you might think.” So begins Revolution of the Soul. What comes next reads like a riveting (...) memoir filled with uncensored moments of joy, pain, wonder, and humor. Except, this book is so much more than that. Seane's real purpose is to guide us into a deep, gut-level understanding of our highest Self through yoga philosophy and other tools for emotional healing—not just as abstract ideas but as embodied, fully felt wisdom. Why? To spark a "revolution of the soul" in each of us, so we can awaken to our purpose and become true agents of change. Just a few of the stops along the way include: The everyday "angels" Seane finds in the gritty corners of New York's 1980s East Village; her early struggles as a total yoga-class misfit; the profound shadow work and body-based practices that helped her to heal childhood trauma, OCD, unhealthy behaviors, and relationship wounding; hard-earned lessons from some of the most heartbreaking places on the planet; and many other unforgettable teaching stories. (shrink)

Textor reveals the roots of analytic philosophy in a great age of Austro-German philosophy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He introduces Brentano, Mach, and other key figures, and traces the development of the landmark ideas that there can be 'psychology without a soul', and that metaphysics lies beyond the limits of knowledge.

_Naturalization of the Soul_ charts the development of the concepts of soul and self in Western thought, from Plato to the present. It fills an important gap in intellectual history by being the first book to emphasize the enormous intellectual transformation in the eighteenth century, when the religious 'soul' was replaced first by a philosophical 'self' and then by a scientific 'mind'. The authors show that many supposedly contemporary theories of the self were actually discussed in the eighteenth (...) century, and recognize the status of William Hazlitt as one of the most important Personal Identity theorists of the British Enlightenment, for his direct relevance to contemporary thinking. Now available in paperback, _Naturaliazation of the Soul_ is essential reading for anyone interested in the issues at the core of the Western philosophical tradition. (shrink)

According to Plutarch, the theory of psychological disharmony relies on the Platonic music harmony. When Plato refers to music harmony, he means the kind of harmony where the concept of God is the source through which all beings emanate. The mental passions define the quality of human character and consequently develop the social man. As far as the Aristotelian ethical theory is concerned, morality does not condemn the passions, because it has a clear ontological and anthropological basis. The Stoics stress (...) that a trait of the human soul is sociality, and that happens because all human beings are under the law of sympathy and constitute a whole. At medieval times, Boethius portrays the middle age social conditions which also resemble with our postmodern societies. (shrink)

This paper critically examines the metaphorical use of medical terms in philosophy. Three examples selected from distinct philosophical contexts demonstrate that such terms have been employed as metaphors both to describe the practice of philosophising and historically to diagnose philosophical positions. The selected examples are (i) the title of Avicenna’s main philosophical work, The Book of Healing, (ii) the criticism of medical metaphors in Enlightenment philosophy, and (iii) recent historical diagnoses in philosophy. The underlying epistemological assumptions of (...) all three contexts are reconstructed to critically analyse the medical metaphors. Through this tripartite synopsis, I arrive at a normative conclusions medical metaphors, such as the “healing of the soul” or “pathology of reason”, do not stand up to the critique of Enlightenment and are obsolete against the theoretical background of my reference texts. (shrink)

What would Christianity be like without the soul? While most people would expect the Christian bible to reveal a highly traditional opposition of matter and spirit, the spirit forces of the Old and New Testaments are often surprisingly physical, dynamic, and practical, a matter of energy as much as ethics. The Secret History of the Soul examines the forgotten or suppressed models of body, soul, and human consciousness found in the literature, philosophy and scripture of the (...) ancient and classical worlds. It shows how the spirit forces of Homer, Plato, Aristotle, and the Old and New Testaments tended to be quantities not entities, and to be closely bound up with the dynamic physical flux of the human body, rather than cleanly abstracted in some absolute immaterial realm. Forces such as menos and thymos, nephesh, pneuma and dynamis not only blurred the line between body and soul, but were potent and transferable, being used, in New Testament culture, to effect magical cures or bestow magical power. Related to this surprising lack of body-soul dualism is a lack of dualistic afterlife in either Homer or Hebrew scripture, where Hades and Sheol are the sole post-mortem destinations. The Secret History of the Soul restores the living strangeness of a spirit world filled with potent energy and practical magic, in cultures which had not yet glimpsed the abstracted soul of later Christianity. (shrink)

The Light of the Soul examines the debate between Leibniz, Malebranche, and Descartes on the nature of ideas, which was crucial to the development of early modern thinking about the mind and knowledge. Nicholas Jolley guides the reader through the debate and considers its implications for a broad range of issues, such as innate ideas, self-knowledge, scepticism, the mind-body problem, and the creation of the eternal truths, which are as important to philosophy today as they were in the (...) seventeenth century. (shrink)

This paper aims at a partial rehabilitation of E. A. Moody''s characterization of the 14th century as an age of rising empiricism, specifically by contrasting the conception of the natural science of psychology found in the writings of a prominent 13th-century philosopher (Thomas Aquinas) with those of two 14th-century philosophers (John Buridan and Nicole Oresme). What emerges is that if the meaning of empiricism can be disengaged from modern and contemporary paradigms, and understood more broadly in terms of a cluster (...) of epistemic doctrines concerned with the methodology of knowing, it characterizes very appropriately some of the differences between the ways in which late-medieval thinkers both understood and practised the science of psychology. In particular, whereas Aquinas thinks psychology is about reasoning demonstratively to the real nature of the soul from its evident operations (thereby assimilating psychology to metaphysics), Buridan and Oresme, both of whom doubt whether real animate natures can be known empirically, focus on giving detailed accounts of those operations themselves (thereby assimilating psychology to physics). (shrink)

This paper examines the deployment of science studies within the field of medical ethics. For a short time, the discourse of medical ethics became a fertile ground for a dialogue between philosophically minded bioethicists and the philosophers of science who responded to Thomas Kuhn's challenge. In their discussion of the validity of Kuhn's work, these bioethicists suggested a distinct interpretation of Kuhn, emphasizing the elements in his account that had been independently developed by Michael Polanyi, and propelling a view of (...) science that retreated from idealizations of scientific method without sacrificing philosophical realism. Appropriating Polanyi, they extended his account of science to biology and medicine. The contribution of Karl Popper to the debate on the applicability of philosophy of science to the issues of medical ethics provides the opportunity to discuss the ways in which political agendas of different epistemologies of science intertwined with questions of concern to medical ethics. (shrink)

"The Philosophy of the Future" which has cost the author 'more than half a century of toil', is a stout defense of the principle of Causation both against the philosophical scientists who, following Hume, would reduce cause to customary sequence among our sense-impressions, and against the subordination by many writers on logic of the notion of cause to that of reason or ground. To cancel causality is to efface all distinction between truth and falsehood. Scientia est cognoscere causas. "The (...) sole essential function of all thinking is to discriminate between cause and effect." "There is no known form of thought which is not ultimately reducible into an assertion of cause and effect." From the vantage ground of this theorem, with its corollary that "a cause cannot be known except through its effects, or an effect apart from its cause", Mr. Hebberd trains his guns upon the systems of Hume, Kant, Hegel, Mill, and other logical writers. He reviews successively Space, Time, the Concept, Judgment, and finally Induction, defined as "the discovery of causal processes by means of physical and mental experiment", in the attempt to show that all categories are but species and derivative forms under the supreme and all-embracing category of causality. The logical discussion is followed by chapters on God, Freedom and the Soul, in which the metaphysical application of his principles is made. The causal concept is utilized to strengthen the ontological argument. "The conception of a sufficient cause, fully understood, is identical with the theistic conception of God." This conception of a sufficient cause involves unity, infinitude, freedom and love (if an infinite being acts at all, or causes any changes, it must be for the sake of others). The fact again that the causal nexus is "a reality imperceptible to the senses" discredits materialism and positivism, and is used in demonstration of the existence and immortality of the soul. Mr. Hebberd attempts no exact definition of cause, but this, as he says in the appendix, is because he regards it as incapable of ordinary definition, "there being no wider genus under which it can be ranged as a species" (p. 214). He omits also any discussion of the origin of the causal concept. While frequently inveighing against innate ideas and Kantian apriorities, and rejecting impartially "the Scottish philosophy of 'common sense', with its short and easy method of 'intuitions', the French and English empiricism, the Teutonic illusionism" (p. 95) he yet declares: "Man does come into the world equipped, not with intuitions, but with the means of attaining to an assured knowledge of the world as the workmanship of an infinite and benevolent Being. For he comes endowed with the prerogative of thought; but to think is to affirm causality" (p. 157). What is this but intuitionism? Mr. Hebberd's work, it will be seen, is a discussion at once ambitious and concise of the deepest problems of logic and metaphysics. His book, in our judgment, is well worth the attention of the philosophical reader, who cannot but enjoy its incisive style, its trenchant criticisms, its wide outlook upon philosophic thought, and its original insights into its problems. -The Princeton Theological Review, Vol. 12 [1914]. (shrink)

I suspect that my idea of what it would be like to take a course given by William Barrett is fairly accurate. The flyleaf of his new book reports that Barrett, now Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Pace University, received the Great Teacher Award at New York University. That note and a reading of Barrett's books, the classic Irrational Man, The Illusion of Technique, The Truants, and especially Death of the Soul, lead me to suspect that in the (...) classroom Barrett is as marvelous a communicator as he is on the written page. (shrink)

In The Recovery of the Soul, Kenneth Rankin suggests that the current impasse over solutions to many philosophical problems is the result, in part, of a failure to consider how each of these problems bears on the rest. Rankin shows that a libertarian theory of free will, an A-theory of time, a corporealist theory of personal identity, and a non-relativist interpretation of the foundation of ethics all contribute to or are derived from a psychocentric form of physicalism. The proposed (...) Modal Identity thesis identifies the mind, or that which ensouls the body, with a strictly physical power, the power to act intentionally from occasion to occasion in any one of several mutually exclusive ways. Rankin argues further that the non-arbitrary individuation of particular physical things derives from the causal powers they possess. The distinctive power that ensouls our bodies is identified as the primary causal power: all other powers derive their status as powers from it in so far as they are constitutive, or instruments, of it. Rankin demonstrates that many of our ontological preconceptions are Aristotelian in origin. The psychocentric physicalism of the central thesis is a response to Aristotle's question "What is being?" and in the earlier chapters of the book Aristotle's contributions to a theory of being are used as a preliminary study to suggest which parts of these preconceptions should be kept and which revised. Later chapters suggest that failure to resolve many philosophical problems results in part from the failure of Aristotle's philosophy to fulfil its promise. (shrink)

This book is a clear and concise history of the soul in western philosophy, from Plato to cutting-edge contemporary work in philosophy of mind. Packed with arguments for and against a range of different, historically significant philosophies of the soul Addresses the essential issues, including mind-body interaction, the causal closure of the physical world, and the philosophical implications of the brain sciences for the soul's existence Includes coverage of theories from key figures, such as Plato, (...) Aquinas, Locke, Hume, and Descartes Unique in combining the history of ideas and the development of a powerful case for a non-reductionist, non-materialist account of the soul. (shrink)

This book offers a provocative interpretation of the theory of the soul in the writings of the French Cartesian, Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715). Though recent work on Malebranche's philosophy of mind has tended to emphasize his account of ideas, Schmaltz focuses rather on his rejection of Descartes' doctrine that the mind is better known than the body. In particular, he considers and defends Malebranche's argument that this rejection has a Cartesian basis. Schmaltz reveals that this argument not only provides (...) a fresh perspective on Cartesianism but also is relevant to current debates in the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

The Politics of the Soul: Eric Voegelin on Religious Experience includes eight essays examining one of the most profound studies of religious experience to appear in the last century: that of the political philosopher Eric Voegelin. Voegelin is increasingly recognized as a political theorist of exceptional scope and erudition and the most important philosopher of his time since Toynbee, and his treatment of religious experience is a crucial part of his overall analysis of existence and history. This collection of (...) essays by prominenet Voegelin scholars is the first book to explore the relevance of that analysis to the contemporary understanding of political theory, theology, history, and philosophy of consciousness, and as such it constitutes a significant contribution not only to Voegelin scholarship but to the current quest for theoretical foundations. (shrink)

In the 12th century the "Book of the Soul" by the philosopher Avicenna was translated from Arabic into Latin. It had an immense success among scholastic writers and deeply influenced the structure and content of many psychological works of the Middle Ages. The reception of Avicenna's book is the story of cultural contact at an imipressively high intellectural level. The present volume investigates this successful reception using two approaches. The first is chronological, tracing the stages by which Avicenna's work (...) was accepted and adapted by Latin scholars. The second is doctrinal, analyzing the fortunes of key doctrines. The sense of the original Arabic text of Avicenna is kept in mind throughout and the degree to which his original Latin interpreters succeeded in conveying it is evaluated. (shrink)

Ours is an age full of desires but impoverished in its understanding of where those desires lead—an age that claims mastery over the world but also claims to find the world as a whole absurd or unintelligible. In The Vision of the Soul, James Matthew Wilson seeks to conserve the great insights of the western tradition by giving us a new account of them responsive to modern discontents. The western— or Christian Platonist—tradition, he argues, tells us that man is (...) an intellectual animal, born to pursue the good, to know the true, and to contemplate all things in beauty. Wilson begins by reconceiving the intellectual conservatism born of Edmund Burke’s jeremiad against the French Revolution as an effort to preserve the West’s vision of man and the cosmos as ordered by and to beauty. After defining the achievement of that vision and its tradition, Wilson offers an extended study of the nature of beauty and the role of the fine arts in shaping a culture but above all in opening the human intellect to the perception of the form of reality. Through close studies of Theodor W. Adorno and Jacques Maritain, he recovers the classical vision of beauty as a revelation of truth and being. Finally, he revisits the ancient distinction between reason and story-telling, between mythos and logos, in order to rejoin the two. Story-telling is foundational to the forms of the fine arts, but it is no less foundational to human reason. Human life in turn constitutes a specific kind of form—a story form. The ancient conception of human life as a pilgrimage to beauty itself is one that we can fully embrace only if we see the essential correlation between reason and story and the essential convertibility of truth, goodness and beauty in beauty. By turns a study in fundamental ontology, aesthetics, and political philosophy, Wilson’s book invites its readers to a renewal of the West’s intellectual tradition. (shrink)

The soul, which dominated many intellectual debates at the beginning of the twentieth century, has virtually disappeared from the sciences and the humanities. Yet it is everywhere in popular culture-from holistic therapies and new spiritual practices to literature and film to ecological and political ideologies. Ignored by scholars, it is hiding in plain sight in a plethora of religious, psychological, environmental, and scientific movements. This book uncovers the history of the concept of the soul in twentieth-century Europe and (...) North America. Beginning in fin de siècle Germany, Kocku von Stuckrad examines a fascination spanning philosophy, the sciences, the arts, and the study of religion, as well as occultism and spiritualism, against the backdrop of the emergence of experimental psychology. He then explores how and why the United States witnessed a flowering of ideas about the soul in popular culture and spirituality in the latter half of the century. Von Stuckrad examines an astonishingly wide range of figures and movements-ranging from Ernest Renan, Martin Buber, and Carl Gustav Jung to the Esalen Institute, deep ecology, and revivals of shamanism, animism, and paganism to Rachel Carson, Ursula K. Le Guin, and the Harry Potter franchise. Revealing how the soul remains central to a culture that is only seemingly secular, this book casts new light on the place of spirituality, religion, and metaphysics in Europe and North America today. (shrink)

This book is a meditation on the different aspects of colour, particularly its relationship to healing. Drawing on examples from natural science and spiritual science, Klocek focuses on the real essence of colours and how they relate to human beings in our physical body and soul. From Newton to Rudolf Steiner, and including the development of artistic pigments, this enlightening book shows how colour can be linked to healing with artistic therapies, homeopathy and flower essences.Illustrated in colour with numerous (...) diagrams and examples of art from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century, this book offers surprising insights into a subject that is integral to our everyday life and development. (shrink)

In Science of the Soul in Ibn Sina's Pointers and Reminders, Michael A. Rapoport provides a philological and interpretive guide for critically reading and interpreting Ibn Sina's (Avicenna, d. 1037) most challenging and influential text. Rapoport argues that chapters VII-X of the Pointers present scientific explanations for phenomena related to the human soul - from intellection to divination, magic, and marvels - within the framework of Ibn Sina's Metaphysics of the Rational Soul. This book dispels widespread notions (...) that the Pointers represents Ibn Sina's mystical or Sufi philosophy and therefore stands apart from the rest of his corpus. (shrink)

Focusing on the period between Albertus Magnus and Descartes, the ten contributions examine various Aristotelian theories of the soul.

The City-State of the Soul: Self-Constitution in Plato’s Republic offers a reinterpretation of Plato’s philosophical masterpiece, which presents the moral life as consisting, most deeply, in the constituting or “founding” of one’s own soul. Plato wants to persuade the brightest and most ambitious that the life of justice and, in particular, of just governance puts their talents and ambitions to their best possible use.

This book takes the form of intellectual histories of eight major representative figures of the twentieth century, who inherited and responded to the spiritual problematic left by Nietzsche. With each figure offering very different ethical and spiritual positions, all shed light on what we mean when we talk confusedly around the topics of politics and religion. With portraits of Max Weber, Georg Lukács, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, George Orwell and Hannah Arendt, the author explores the 'latent' (...) content of their worldview - their moral (or immoral) intention - exposing a political position and the religious position of each figure, thus shedding light on their ultimate values and illuminating their particular picture of the soul, as well as the implications of their vision for religion and politics. As such, The Politics of the Soul will appeal to scholars of sociology and social theory, religion, philosophy, political theory and cultural studies. (shrink)

In recent years much scholarly work has explored the topic of John Chrysostom as an ancient “psychagogue”. In these recent studies, however, relatively little attention has been devoted to Chrysostom’s approach to almsgiving in relation to the cure of the soul. This article looks closely at Chrysostom’s view of almsgiving and soul therapy within the context of ancient philosophical therapy. Analyzing Chrysostom’s Homilies on Matthew, it demonstrates that for Chrysostom almsgiving is a crucial remedy for healing the sick (...) soul. (shrink)

Recent museum practice has seen a return to ‘wonder’ as a governing principle for display and visitor engagement. Wonder has long been a contentious topic in aesthetics, literary studies, and philosophy of religion, but its adoption in the museum world has been predominantly uncritical. Here I will suggest that museums draw on a concept of wonder that is largely unchanged from seventeenth-century philosophy, yet without taking account of early modern doubts about wonder's efficacy for knowledge. In this paper (...) I look at Descartes' and Spinoza's views about wonder and the uses and disadvantages of wonder as a learning tool. This examination is extended to consider Descartes' and Spinoza's likely views about ‘museums’, in the sense of spaces that link objects both to feeling and to knowing. Finally, I suggest that there are resources in Spinoza's philosophy for bringing knowledge-enhancing feelings into the museum without resorting to the problematic concept of wonder. (shrink)

Plato's thought on the question of the immortality of the soul, in the sense of the existence after death of an individual personality, is stated by Constantin Ritter in his book on The Essence of Plato's Philosophy as follows: “I must admit that for Plato personal immortality was a serious problem and that his whole exposition and especially the trend of his argument in the Phaedo , urges us to accept it” ; and again—“The notion of immortality in (...) the sense that we understand it, viz. the survival of personality beyond the limits of earthly existence, was for Plato a serious problem; but it never became a dogma with him, even though he gives us a strong hint in the Phaedo to affirm this notion”. (shrink)

Traditional ideas about the basic nature of humanity are under attack as never before. The very attributes that make us human--free will, the permanence of personal identity, the existence of the soul--are being undermined and threatened by the current revolution in the science of the mind. If the mind is the brain, and therefore a physical object subject to deterministic laws, how can we have free will? If most of our thoughts and impulses are unconscious, how can we be (...) morally responsible for what we do? The Problem of the Soul shows the way out of these seemingly intractable paradoxes. Framing the conflict in terms of two dominant visions of the mind--the "manifest image" of humanistic philosophy and theology, and the scientific image--renowned philosopher Owen Flanagan demonstrates that there is, in fact, common ground, and that we need not give up our ideas of moral responsibility and personal freedom in order to have an empirically sound view of the human mind. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Naturalism versus Theism The Physical World Cross‐Cultured Inquiry Value Inquiry.

This paper offers a comprehensive examination of the language of “prosōpon” in Maximus the Confessor. It emerges that “prosōpon” almost never has an autonomous meaning in Maximus’ Christology and anthropology. While “person” is either a synonym for “hypostasis” or a term expressing heretical Christological doctrines, it may be used in its own right when Maximus emphasizes the fact that human actions make each of us recognizable as a unique individual. This usage cannot be separated from the colloquial meanings of “face” (...) and “character,” or from instances of “prosōpon” in Maximian Biblical exegesis. “The face of the intellect,” identified with “the face of Christ” within us and reflected in our actions as “the face of the soul,” is the perfect image of the eternal Divine logoi of virtues, impressed by grace in the intellect of saints and reflected in their actions. Possessing one’s own “persona” or “face,” and building one’s uniqueness through one’s own decisions, is of less interest to Maximus than assimilation of oneself to Christ. (shrink)