The modern debate over the hellenistic doctrine of the fine-material soul-vehicle, including contributions by R. C. Kissling, E. R. Dodds, and J. Halfwassen, has seen an increasingly earlier date of origin being attributed to this doctrine. But the author who introduced the theory remains an unknown quantity. In this article I will argue that the author of this doctrine can be no other than Aristotle.

Generation and heredity theories before early modern mechanist accounts might be faulted for numerous deficits. One might cite in this regard the failure to even attempt to explain how the inheritance of traits could occur, given what is known about the generation of new individuals. On the other hand, it would be hard to allow this as a true failure against the backdrop of a generation theory that poses form, and not matter, as the key to understanding the emergence of (...) new structures in the offspring of two organisms. Hence the signal contribution of the mechanist accounts in this sphere was simply the suggestion that theories of generation and heredity might look to matter and its behavior in order to explain how new individuals are created and retain or discard features of the individuals whence they sprung. Among these accounts, one early important set of views was presented by Pierre Gassendi, eventually as a full-blown atomist conjecture but even beforehand, and early on, as a thoroughgoing materialist theory. Gassendi's materialist mechanism for the transmission of traits is imperfect (and by the common sense of our day, implausible), not always or exclusively deployed in generation, and not clearly the physical bearer of information, as conformity to a materialist model would suggest. Nonetheless, his proposed mechanism represents a valuable attempt to provide an account of inheritance phenomena in materialist and ultimately atomist terms and rooted in an account of generation. (shrink)

Proclus argues that place (topos) is a body of light, identified as the luminous vehicle of the soul, which mediates between soul and body and facilitates motion. Simplicius (in Phys. 611,10–13) suggests that this theory is original to Proclus, and unique in describing light as a body. This paper focuses on the function of this theory as a bridge between Proclus’ physics and metaphysics, allowing the Aristotelian physical notion of “natural place” to serve as a mechanism for (...) the descent and ascent of the soul. (shrink)

The ancient Neoplatonic doctrine that the rational soul has one or more vehicles—bodies of a semi-material nature which it acquires during its descent through the spheres—plays a crucial part in Marsilio Ficino’s philosophical system, especially in his theory of sense-perception and in his account of the afterlife. Of the soul’s three vehicles, the one made of more or less rarefied air is particularly important, according to Ficino, during the soul’s embodied existence, for he identifies it with thespiritus, (...) the pneumatic substance based in the brain which was believed to serve as an instrument for perception and imagination. He refers to the vehicles in his arguments against the theory of the transmigration of souls into the bodies of animals, claiming that the imaginative suffering experienced after death by souls in their aerial bodies are much more acute than the physical pain they might feel in bodies made of flesh and blood. Since the power of the imagination, for Ficino, is stronger than that of the four senses, the soul’s perceptive activity is more intense after death, when it has lost its earthly body and lives instead in a body made of air. The vehicles, moreover, provided Ficino with evidence for the individual immortality of souls, a doctrine that he was attempting to demonstrate philosophically against the position of Averroes and his followers. In his view, the vehicles ensured the survival after death of two faculties which were intimately connected to personal identity: the imagination and memory. By pointing out the role of the vehicles in transporting the soul’s innermost representations and memories through the universe, Ficino was able to show that the distinguishing traits of our personality are not lost with bodily death, but survive along with the vehicle that carries them. (shrink)

Proposes an innovative rethinking of Aristotle’s work as a system that integrates his theology with his doctrine of reproduction and life. In this deep rethinking of Aristotle’s work, Abraham P. Bos argues that scholarship on Aristotle’s philosophy has erred since antiquity in denying the connection between his theology and his doctrine of reproduction and life in the earthly sphere. Beginning with an analysis of God’s role in the Aristotelian system, Bos explores how this relates to other elements of his philosophy, (...) especially to his theory of reproduction. The argument he develops is that in talking about the cosmos, Aristotle rejected Plato’s metaphor of artisanal production by a divine Demiurge in favor of a biotic metaphor based on the transmission of life in reproduction, in which pneuma—not breath as it is often interpreted but the life-bearing spirit in animals and plants—plays a key and sustaining role as the vital principle in all that lives. In making this case, he defends the authenticity of the treatises De Mundo and De Spiritu as Aristotle’s, and demonstrates Aristotle’s works as a unified system that sharply and comprehensively refutes Plato’s, and in particular replaces Plato’s doctrine of the soul with a theory in which the soul is clearly distinguished from the intellect. “Bos offers a fresh, interesting, and important perspective. His interpretation will be very controversial, but if he is right, the standard Anglo-American interpretation of Aristotle will have to change radically.” — Malcolm Wilson, author of Structure and Method in Aristotle’s Meteorologica: A More Disorderly Nature. (shrink)

This paper explores the moral responsibility a manager has toward a worker. The primary focus is upon those relationships whereworkers have been led to trust their managers. I argue that in such circumstances, models of the employment relationship based on rational self-interest fail to adequately describe the behavior of the actors. Rather, I show through case studies how trust operates in these environments to supercede pure, self-interested behavior. I then explore the moral implications of this finding relative to those managers (...) who lead their workers to trust them. I make the claim that these managers cannot adequately discharge their moral obligations unless they take on positive moral obligations. I cast this responsibility as one of positive care for some portion of worker welfare and briefly discuss what this might mean in practice. (shrink)

This article probes the advisability of regulating U.S. food and drug safety according to the precautionary principle. To do so, a precautionary regulatory regime is formulated on the basis of the beliefs that motivate most proponents of this initiative. That hypothetical regime is critically analyzed on the basis of an actual instantiation of a similarly stylized initiative. It will be argued that the precautionary principle entails regulatory constraints that are apt to violate basis tenets of political legitimacy. The modifications that (...) would change this finding would also change precautionary regulation to the point that it would be indistinguishable from orthodox safety protocols. It is concluded on the basis of its impoverished content that the precautionary principle should not be taken seriously as a formal approach to the regulation of U.S. food and drug safety. (shrink)

This article explains and criticizes several of Hume's arguments regarding British economic policy. I focus on Hume's methodology, which is essentially utilitarian but also depends heavily on his philosophical account of human psychology. I claim that the arguments examined prevail over competing 18th century approaches to economic policy. And I explain the relevance of this methodology for present day public policy debates.

This study was developed around concerns about how indigenous knowledges have been represented and applied in environment and development education. The first phase of the study is a genealogical analysis after Michel Foucault. This probes representations and applications of plant-based indigenous knowledge in selected anthropological, botanical and environmental education texts in southern Africa. The emerging insights were deepened using a Social Realism vantage point after Margaret Archer to shed light on agential issues in environmental education and development contexts. Here her (...) morphogenetic/morphostatic analysis of social transformation or reproduction is used to trace changes in indigenous knowledge representations and applications over time . The second phase uses the same perspectives and tools to extend the analysis of power/knowledge relationships into the interface of indigenous communities and modern institutions in two case study settings in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. This study reveals colonially-derived hegemonic processes of modern/Western scientific institutional representations/interpretations of the knowledges of indigenous communities. It also tracks a continuing trajectory of their dominating and prescriptive mediating control over local knowledges from the pre-colonial context through into the post-colonial period in southern Africa. The analysis reveals how this hegemony is sustained through the deployment of institutional strategies of representation that transform local knowledges into the disciplinary knowledge discourses of modern scientific institutions. These representational strategies therefore generate/reproduce and validate disciplinary discourses about the other, constructing disciplinary 'regimes of truth'. In this way modern institutions appropriate and displace indigenous/local knowledges, silence the voices of local communities and regulate individual and community agency within a continuing subjugation of indigenous knowledges. This study reveals how working within modern institutions and disciplinary knowledges in participative education and development interactions can serve to implicate indigenous researchers in these institutional hegemonic processes. The study also notes evidence of a continued resistance to hegemonic Western knowledge discourses as indigenous communities have sustained many knowledge practices alongside Western knowledge discourses. There is also evidence of a recent emergence of counter-hegemonic indigenous knowledge discourses in environmental education and development practices in southern Africa. It is noted that these have been contingent upon the changing political terrain in southern Africa as this has opened the way for alternative discourses to the dominant conventional Western knowledges in formal education and development contexts. The counterhegemonic discourses invert power/knowledge relations, decentre hegemonic discourses and reposition indigenous knowledges in formal education and development contexts. This study suggests the need to foreground indigenous knowledges as a process of knowledge decolonisation that gives contextual and epistemic relevance to environmental education and development processes. This calls for a need for new strategies to transform existing institutions by creating enabling spaces for the representational inclusion of indigenous knowledges in formal/conventional knowledge discourses and their application in social contexts. This opens up possibilities for plural knowledge representations and for their integrative and reciprocal co-engagement in situated contexts of environmental education and development in southern Africa. (shrink)

The paper is devoted to a conceptual model of cell patterning, based on a generalized notion of the epigenetic code of a cell determining its state. We introduce the concept of signaling depending both upon the spatial distance between cells and the distance between their cell states (s-distance); signaling can repel cells in the space of cell states (s-space) or attract them. The influence of different types of repelling signaling on the evolution of cells is considered. Stabilizing signaling, namely a (...) signaling monotonically decreasing with s-distance, causes the restoring of cell states after perturbations; destabilizing signaling, i.e., the one in which the signaling monotonically increases with s-distance, causes the appearance of pairs of cells with alternating cell states (one close to the state conventionally called “head”, and another close to the “tail” state). Non-monotonic (in s-space) signaling splits the cells into groups. The model shows that different types of signaling may provide different types of cellular patterns. General principles for applying this model to complex cellular structures are discussed. (shrink)

In his embryological treatise De plastica seminis facultate , Jacob Schegk , professor of philosophy and medicine at the University of Tübingen, developed, through a unique interpretation of the Aristotelian embryology, a theory of the "plastic faculty" , whose origin lay in the Galenic idea of the formative power. The present study analyses the precise nature of Schegk's theory, by setting it in its historical and intellectual context. It will also discuss the hitherto unappreciated Neoplatonic dimension of Schegk's notion of (...) the soul's vehicle. (shrink)

Aristote, pendant l'Antiquité grecque, affirmait que "tous les hommes ont un désir naturel de savoir". De cette formule sont nées des questions essentielles dont une des plus importantes : comment connaît-on? Pour y répondre, Descartes, au début de la modernité, a également pensé à une disposition naturelle de l'homme à connaître. En supposant que "le bon sens est la chose du monde la mieux partagée", il faisait de la raison le signe distinctif existant entre l'homme et les autres êtres vivants. (...) La raison caractérise l'homme et s'emploie suivant une pluralité de modalités et en fonction des différentes sensibilités intellectuelles. Cet ouvrage, Le pluralisme des rationalités. Etats des lieux, débats et interrogations, est un ensemble de textes dont les auteurs expriment, en fonction de leurs sensibilités philosophiques, des champs d'expression de la raison. (shrink)

La 4e de couverture indique :"Dans une société inflationniste en droit, libérale à cause de la logique capitaliste et où la laïcité conditionne les valeurs démocratiques, il est légitime que l'homme ressente une sorte de dépaysement ou de désenchantement, puisqu'il semble ne plus être au centre des réflexions philosophiques et scientifiques qui faisaient de lui une valeur absolue. Cet ouvrage est un ensemble de textes abordant, à partir des thématiques multilatérales, une question centrale portant sur la re-centration de l'homme. Il (...) s'est agi, pour chacun des auteurs, suivant sa sensibilité philosophique, de savoir si l'homme n'est plus le centre ou au centre du monde. En fait, avec l'économie libérale, une rationalité (bio)-technologiquement conditionnée et enfin une sécularisation de l'humain, l'homme est dans l'obligation de penser les conditions d'une redéfinition de son exceptionnalité.". (shrink)

La notion d’un corps intermédiaire, connu sous le nom de véhicule de l’âme dans le néoplatonisme, est destinée à expliquer l’union de l’âme et du corps, mais aussi l’articulation du rationnel et de l’irrationnel, les communications avec le divin, et le maintien d’une forme de vie post mortem. Cette étude montre comment les premières attestations d’un usage structuré de la notion, sous la forme « le pneuma est le (premier) véhicule de l’âme », apparaissent dans deux contextes différents, fort éloignés (...) l’un de l’autre : une discussion de physiologie sur le pneuma optique, chez Galien ; et une explicitation philosophique de l’eschatologie d’Homère, dans le De Homero du Pseudo-Plutarque. Ce sont cependant les témoins les plus clairs d’une doctrine qui est encore en gestation dans le platonisme impérial. L’analyse montre en particulier ce que le médecin doit au Timée de Platon, ce que l’allégoriste doit à la théorie médicale des exhalaisons du sang, quand ils formulent cette nouvelle hypothèse commune sur la nature du pneuma, appuyée sur Platon et Aristote, et manifestement présentée comme une alternative à la doctrine stoïcienne de l’âme-pneuma. (shrink)

Soul is the self-moving, self-constituting entity linking the transcendent with the immanent. Proclus distinguishes many types of souls. This chapter concentrates on the World Soul and the rational human soul. The World Soul infuses the sensible, temporal, divided, and material cosmos with unity and Forms ultimately deriving from the One and Intelligible Being, in a manner reminiscent of human phantasia. The mathematical psychology of the Timaeus is explained as referring to the Soul’s activity, rather than (...) its essence. Concerning the human soul, with its eternal essence and temporal activity, the authors concentrate on the function and nature of the many ‘vehicles’, assisting the soul’s descent and, in a different manner, its ascent. (shrink)

The link between seen and unseen, matter and spirit, flesh and soul was always presumed, but never clarified enough, leaving room for debates and mostly controversies between the scientific domains and theologies of a different type; how could God, who is immaterial, have created the material world? Therefore, the logic of obtaining a result on this concern is first to see how religions have always seen the ratio between divinity and matter/universe. In this part, the idea of a world (...) personality is implied by many, so that nature itself was transformed into a person ; others have seen within the universe/the world a Spirit ruling all, connecting all and bending all to God’s commands. In a way or another, every culture has gifted the universe/nature with the capability of ruling all, seeing everything and controlling, even determining facts by connecting all together with a Great Spirit. What is this Great Spirit of all and where it resides? With the analogy of human body in relation to his Spirit we will try to figure out a place or vehicle for the Spirit to dwell the body, and the Great Spirit the matter. The Christianity names this linkage between God and matter as ‘the created grace of God’, which indwells matter and helps the Creator move and transform things. Is there any scientific argument to sustain such assertion? Can we argue somehow that God’s voice makes matter vibrate from within the way it can recombine primer elements into giant stars to the human body? If so, what should be the ratio between theology and science on this issue and with these assertions? How could God command to matter to bring things and beings out of it and what were the material leverages that was supposed to be operated to accomplish His will? However, if we can assume that God resides in the universe – as a whole, His body, or as in its very fabric – can we also figure out how is this even possible, without transforming our explanation into a pantheistic and immanent exclusive one? Through these ‘divine leverages within matter’ theory, there is no need for questioning evolutionism, creationism, pantheism, deism and many other cosmological hypotheses any longer. (shrink)

Peter Lombard lamented the abandonment of Augustine’s position affirming the materiality of demons and the demonic body, since by his time (some 700 years after Augustine), under the influence of the Pseudo-Dionysius, it was generally agreed within the Christian tradition that demons (and angels) are intelligible, disembodied substances. The principles that the cosmos is spatially and materially divided and stratified and that demons share ontologically in the nature of the part that they inhabit allowed figures such as Apuleius, Porphyry, and (...) Augustine to account for various aspects of demonic nature and activity that seemed to follow from reason, revelation, and practical experience. The material body of the demon and its relation to the pneuma, or vehicle of the soul, is often invoked to explain demonic agency and the extent of demonic knowledge and to distinguish between evil and good demons (or angels). The following paper weighs in on and clarifies Augustine’s demonic ontology. Although scholars generally recognise Augustine’s position maintaining that demons possess aerial bodies, nevertheless, the ambiguity surrounding Augustine’s opinion, attested to even by Peter Lombard, is overlooked, and Augustine’s conviction is often taken for granted and supported by citing the prominent City of God, the very work in which Augustine’s own views are suspect. This paper provides support to the assessment of Augustine’s doctrine of the demonic body by examining his cosmology, particularly his spatial and elemental division of the cosmos, and exhibits his adherence to the spatio-material principle according to which a creature’s bodily constitution is cognate with the elemental composition of the physical stratum of the cosmos in which they dwell. The paper concludes by indicating how Augustine’s explanations of demonic agency, far from being ambiguous on the nature of the demonic body, are in fact premised on their aerial corporeality, thereby demonstrating more definitively his conviction that demons possess material bodies. (shrink)

Orphaned in her early teens and shuttled between abusive foster homes, Tatiana Forero Puerta found herself in her early twenties in New York City, haunted by the memories of her tumultuous youth and suicidal. Following emergency hospitalization, she was advised by her doctor to take up yoga. Over days, weeks, months, and then years, she embraced yoga's honesty and discipline--delving more deeply into its wisdom, literature, and, vitally, its practice. In so doing, yoga healed her scars, opened her soul (...) to forgiveness, and allowed her to reconcile herself with a past that had threatened to snuff out her life. Yoga for the Wounded Heart is an unsparingly honest memoir of a childhood lost and of courage and resilience gained. It's also an exploration of the fundamentals of yoga: as a technology that focuses our awareness; as a practical application of mindfulness and attention to what is really going on in our lives and bodies; and as a vehicle for the body to guide the mind and heart toward healing. (shrink)

Rembrandt has been characterized as "the master of the passions of the soul". His painting production has always elicited the viewers' strong emotional responses. Τhese responses raise the question regarding why Rembrandt's work has been singled out as the quintessential example of the expression of emotions both during the 17th century, as well as in recent times. I will try to approach the issue through two different yet interconnected routes. First, I will explore the tools and terms through which (...) the question of the expression of emotions in Rembrandt's oeuvre can be approached. Ancient rhetorical topoi, as well as ideas stemming from Dutch theater writers, drama and art theorists, scholars and art connoisseurs on the rendition of the emotions provide useful points of view. Secondly, I will approach the question by addressing certain stylistic and compositional solutions that Rembrandt suggested, which can be tied to current notions about lifelikeness and the beholder's empathy. Foremost among Rembrandt's aesthetic choices was his handling of light and of paint which accounts for a great deal of unfavorable criticism to his work during the 17th century. I would like to suggest that this handling of light and paint serves as Rembrandt's most important emotive vehicle and furthermore that it introduces us to the idea of wonder and the concept of the sublime in terms of which his depiction of emotions may be understood. Accordingly, I will try to establish an intellectual network in the 17th-century Netherlands for the sublime. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Deep TherapyDiskin ClayThe Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics, by Martha Nussbaum; xiv & 558 pp. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994; $29.95For three decades now interest in Hellenistic philosophy has been gaining among philosophers both in England—and its philosophical colony the United States—and in Europe. The principal documents of the Hellenistic schools have now been made available in both scrupulously edited Greek and Latin texts and (...) fine English translations by A. A. Long and David Sedley in their The Hellenistic Philosophers (1987). Conditions are right for the latest assimilation of this philosophical culture, whose conventional dates are those of the Hellenistic age—from the death of Alexander of Macedon in 323 B.C. to the suicide of the last of his successors, Cleopatra VII of Egypt in 31 B.C., but which in fact extends through the second century A.D. In the fracturing of the autonomous Greek city state and the new empires and cosmopolitanism that grew up in its place, in the turning inward of ethical thought and the simultaneous turning outward of science, the Hellenistic age holds up a mirror to our own. Especially congenial to philosophers in this country and in England is the radical skepticism that reaches from Socrates in the fifth century to Sextus Empiricus in the second century A.D.Martha Nussbaum’s The Therapy of Desire is very much a book for this age. Her topic is the “compassionate medical philosophy” of three of [End Page 501] the Hellenistic schools, the Epicurean, the Skeptic, and the Stoic. In focusing sharply on therapy, she leaves to the side—and on the outside—the connections that made Epicurean and Stoic philosophy systematic. But her awareness of the psychiatric possibilities of modern philosophy and what Michel Foucault called a technique de soi provide the contemporary context for the project of this book, at a stage when Freudian psychology is preparing to make its exit at the end of its century. Medicine is the only science that enters this book’s field of vision. Its thirteen studies (some already familiar) concentrate on the practical and therapeutic aims of Hellenistic philosophy and what the author terms the therapy of the passions, particularly the passions of erotic love, anger, and aggression, and fear of the gods. In The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (1986), Nussbaum took the side of Aristotle against Plato. Here she takes the part of the Epicurean, Skeptic, and Stoic against the ethical theory of Aristotle, who is impressed to illustrate the practical turn in ethics which Nussbaum explores in Therapy. Plato is glimpsed on the horizon of this book “standing on the rim of the heavens” (p. 23). What links the intellectual program of both Fragility and Therapy is Nussbaum’s keen and sympathetic attention to poetry as a vehicle for philosophy or as a provocation to philosophical engagement. Four of the chapters of this study are devoted to poetry: three to Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura; one to Seneca’s Medea.The ethical project illustrated throughout these studies is formulated by Democritus, who first enunciated the claim: “medicine heals the sickness of bodies; but wisdom rids the soul of its sufferings” (DK 68B31). Each of the Hellenistic schools Nussbaum studies repeated this claim. Unexplored is the medical end of the analogy and the degree to which this much invoked analogy (whose terms are fused in our word psychiatry) conforms to actual medical practice, with its pathology, consultation, diagnosis, and treatment (therapeia). Nor is not clear from the Greek record that desires as opposed to the individual who harbors these desires are regarded as the object of therapy. The Hellenistic philosophers were clearly concerned with “extirpating” desires and disruptive passions, but the object of therapy was usually not desire but the individual who is disturbed by desire (as Philodemus, On Plain Speaking 84.11 Olivieri makes plain). But occasionally by extension the passions are described as the objects of therapy (as they are in Diogenes of Oenoanda, fr. 4.II.3 Smith).No one who has read Fragility will be taken aback by Nussbaum’s [End Page 502] invention of a... (shrink)

The Letter of Resolution Concerning Origen and the Chief of His Opinions, published anonymously in London in 1661, is the chief testimony of the renaissance of Origen in early modern Cambridge. Probably authored by George Rust, the later Bishop of Dromore in Ireland, it is the first defence of Origenism, and delineates a rational theology based upon the unshakable foundation of God’s first attribute, his goodness. Trespassing and falling away from God’s goodness, the souls forfeit their original ethereal bodies or (...) ‘vehicles’ and come to inhabit lesser ones made of air and earth. Making responsible use of their freedom, however, they may climb up the ontological ladder again. Rust’s rational theodicy with its stress on God’s universal goodness and the pre-existent soul’s free will is a key document of the Cambridge Platonists’ deeply Origenian philosophy of religion. (shrink)

For a discourse on the spectacle of the transcendental world to be received in its comprehensible and coherent totality, its needs to get rid of the arbitrariness of the dominion of tremulous shapes of the sensitive, which is merely the sphere of opinions. This is what Plato suggests, following the course of reflection of the first thinkers: in order to compensate the deficiencies that entail elision of reality and to transform language into a vehicle of authentic intellection of the (...) fundamental concepts of philosophical thinking, he sets it into the center of a rigorous speculation. In the same way as his predecessors Heraclitus and Parmenides, the philosopher reveals logofilia at exerting himself to build a new discursive structure, different from that of common man and thereby stirring, in the field of philosophy, a revolution that had become indispensable: he elaborates a founding model - the beginning of a permanent order as the prelude to the edification of a formal and abstract language that refers to entities that the majority of humans cannot visualize by themselves. Only through it will the universal truth of the divine Forms be able to shine, which, at lending their names to the endless series of sensible particulars, clarifies them and confers them signification. Through the theories he develops based on them and exposes in the Dialogues,the philosopher aims at inducing the reader to prepare himself to methodically operate the conversion of his soul to the level of these super-sensitive ideal beings and grasp, thus, the reality that founds and turns everything cognizable.Para que um discurso sobre o espetáculo do mundo transcendente seja acolhido como totalidade inteligível e coerente, urge desvencilhar-se da arbitrariedade do domínio de trêmulos contornos do sensível, esfera de opiniões apenas. É o que propõe Platão, na esteira das reflexões dos primeiros pensadores: para suprir deficiências que causam a elisão da realidade e transformar a linguagem num veículo de intelecção autêntica dos conceitos essenciais de um pensar filosófico, ele a coloca no centro de uma especulação rigorosa. Tal como seus antecessores Heráclito e Parmênides, Platão revela logofilia ao empenhar-se na construção de uma nova estrutura discursiva, diferente daquela do homem comum, desencadeando no campo da Filosofia uma revolução que se tornara indispensável: elabora um modelo fundador - princípio de uma ordem permanente propedêutica à construção de uma linguagem formal e abstrata - referente a entes que os homens, na maioria, por si mesmos não conseguem visualizar. Somente nela poderá reverberar a verdade universal das Formas que, ao emprestarem seus nomes à infindável série dos particulares sensíveis, os clarifica e lhes confere significação. Com as teorias que a partir das Formas desenvolve e expõe nos Diálogos, o filósofo visa induzir o leitor a preparar-se para operar, metodicamente, a conversão de sua alma ao plano desses seres ideais, supra-sensíveis, e apreender, assim, a realidade que tudo fundamenta e torna cognoscível. (shrink)

Students all across the country have recently found new motivation to be interested in philosophy—NBC’s The Good Place, which aired its final episode on January 30, 2020. The series explicitly engages with philosophy through the storyline of one of the central characters—Chidi Adagonye—who was, in life, a philosophy professor. In the afterlife, Chidi teaches ethics to a group of wayward souls who, as the show progresses, become the best of friends. Chidi provides a useful narrative vehicle for direct discussion (...) of philosophy. Even in the absence of Chidi’s philosophical explanations, the show is inherently philosophical. It demonstrates that, rather than being an exclusively scholarly pursuit, living philosophically is part of what it is to be a flourishing person. (shrink)

The aim of this long essay is to explain why the philosopher-ruler of Plato's Republic descends “with regret” or having been “compelled” from his contemplation of the Forms to rule the state. It offers a new, optimistic interpretation of his goal in so descending, namely to try to make everyone into a philosopher. After a brief introductory section, I turn to the argument of the Republic to show both that the philosopher's understanding of the Good causes him to try to (...) maximize the amount of good in the cosmos, and that, since every rational person is capable, in virtue of his rational soul, of becoming a philosopher, this amounts to adopting the aforementioned goal. In the third section, I argue that the source of his regret cannot be that he sacrifices his own happiness in descending. Here the vehicle is a consideration of the “Plotinian” reading of the Republic, whose conclusion is that once he has achieved knowledge of the Forms, the philosopher can neither increase his happiness by further study, nor lose his happiness. Hence, if he is true to his goal, he has to try to improve the lot of others. In the next section, I argue that the Timaeus' account of the Demiurge's construction of the cosmos helps us to understand both the nature of the ruler's attempts to make everyone a philosopher and why he also understands that he will inevitably fail. Here the key idea is to link the Timaeus' account of Necessity or the Wandering Cause with the circumstances facing the philosopher in ruling the state. In the conclusion, I sketch how this account of the philosopher's reason for descending suggests that the best or ideal city in the Republic is not the tripartite kallipolis, but is rather a version of the City of Pigs. Footnotesa Parts of this paper have been presented to audiences at Princeton, UCLA, the Australian Association of Philosophy, Monash University, Kansas, and Berkeley. I am indebted to those in the audiences on all those occasions. Special thanks are owed to Chris Bobonich, David Keyt, Fred Miller, and the other contributors to this volume. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Matter and Spirit in the Age of Animal MagnetismEric G. WilsonDuring the Romantic period, writers on both sides of the Atlantic explored the sleepwalker as a merger of holiness and horror. Emerging when scientific thinkers for the first time were connecting spirit to electricity and magnetism, the somnambulist became to certain Romantics a disclosure of the difficulty of harmonizing unseen and seen, agency and necessity. This problem prominently arose (...) in Anton Mesmer's late eighteenth-century experiments in animal magnetism, in which the sleepwalker proved a paradox: an opaque revelation of transparent currents and an unconscious vehicle of sophisticated thought. Romantics such as Coleridge embraced the somnambulist as an embodiment of these troubles involved in relating motion and meaning. Coleridge and those who responded to him saw in the hypnotized human this sobering possibility: the invisible requires the visible to make itself manifest while the visible needs the invisible to become significant. 1 This is sublime and sinister: to elevate a material form to spiritual power is transcendence; to sink the boundless into a body is grotesque.Here I explore the philosophical implications of animal magnetism, the place of the sleepwalker in the history of ideas, and the role of the hypnotized human in Romantic writers, especially Coleridge. I also meditate on relationships between matter and spirit, machine and human, word and thing. Along the way, I place the history of ideas and the works of Romantic writers in mutually illuminating dialogues. The literary texts shed fresh light on philosophical problems while the ideas reveal hidden literary elements.The somnambulistic trance had been around long before Mesmer's magnetic sleeps. For centuries, shamans had used auto-hypnosis to sound [End Page 329] their souls and other-hypnosis to cure their tribe-members' ailments. However, somnambulism could not become a scientific phenomenon until Europeans in laboratories began to study electricity and magnetism. In the early modern period, Paracelsus argued that a vital fluid courses through the cosmos. The human being draws this flow like a magnet attracts force. When the body pulls to itself evil effluvia, it falls ill. To return patients to health, Paracelsus placed magnets on painful areas. He hoped to extract the unwanted current and return it to the cosmic swirl. 2 In "magnetizing" spirit, Paracelsus opened a door for empirical inquiry into the invisible world. In 1600, William Gilbert claimed that magnets correspond to the earth: both are animated by universal attraction and repulsion. 3 By the end of the seventeenth-century, Newton proposed that things are impelled by a force that draws and repels. Newton's theory of gravity inspired natural philosophers of the next centuries to search for a principle of which the magnet and the spark are manifestations. 4During the second half of the eighteenth century and the early part of the nineteenth, natural philosophers explored electricity and magnetism with unprecedented precision. In 1752, Benjamin Franklin revealed the mystery of lightning and perhaps the spark of life. 5 Inspired by Franklin, F. C. Oetinger, J. L. Fricker, and Prokop Divisch developed a theology of electricity, based on the belief that God is the electrical current. 6 Later in the century, Luigi Galvani and Alessandro Volta debated over whether the galvanic flow might be the origin and principle of life itself. 7 A few years before Franklin harvested lightning, John Michell argued that the magnetic force is not constrained to lodestones but is possibly pervasive. Some years later, Franz Aepinus suggested that magnetism and electricity manifest a deep energy. Soon after, C. A. de Coulomb discovered the mathematical law by which electrical and magnetic forces operate (Whittaker, pp. 50–59).These findings led to the breakthroughs of the nineteenth century. 8 In 1807, Humphry Davy hypothesized that chemical elements interact through electromagnetic affinity or repulsion. 9 In 1820, H. C. Oersted demonstrated the correspondence between electricity and magnetism. The same year, A. M. Ampere formulated the laws by which electrical and magnetic currents interact (Whittaker, pp. 81–86). Michael Faraday in 1831 revealed electromagnetic induction and thus inaugurated a second Copernican revolution: he showed that matter is not solid and discrete but a field of electromagnetic energy. 10 The dreams of [End... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Teaching Aesthetics and Aesthetic Teaching:Toward a Deweyan PerspectiveDavid A. Granger (bio)The educational writings of John Dewey continue to be invoked by scholars in education on a regular basis and in relation to a wide variety of issues, from social learning theory and situated cognition to constructivism and whole-language literacy instruction. More recently, this scholarship has begun to expand to include books and essays that look to tie Dewey's aesthetics (...) to his work in education in a substantive way. Notably, this is not something that Dewey attempted himself, since his major work in aesthetics, Art as Experience, was not published until he was seventy-five, and he seemingly had neither the time nor means at that point in his life to develop this link to his satisfaction. In addition, many educators are only familiar with Dewey's more explicitly educational writings, most of which came earlier in his career and tend to speak more of the merits of science than of art. As a result, scholars in education have only recently begun to examine the possible significance of Dewey's aesthetics for the practices of teaching and learning.1It is still the case, however, that writers on Dewey have traditionally focused their critical energies on his expansive claims for "the method of science" as a vehicle for solving numerous educational and social problems, and as the only authentic means of learning about our everyday world. Such critical attention is not, I believe, without warrant; though Dewey's use of "science" was a very loose and liberal one, he was a staunch critic of the positivistic model of science often presumed by these writers. Nonetheless, this critical focus has unfortunately led many writers to dismiss or marginalize the Dewey who, for instance, proclaims in "Art in Education—and Education in Art" that theModern preoccupation with science and with industry based on science has been disastrous; our education has followed the model that [End Page 45] they have set. It has been concerned with intellectual analysis and formularized information.... It is disastrous because it has fixed attention upon competition for control and possession of a fixed environment rather than upon what art can do to create an environment.... It is disastrous because civilization built upon these principles cannot supply the demand of the soul for joy, or freshness of experience; only attention through art to the vivid but transient values of things can effect such refreshment.2As Dewey sees it, science and other forms of knowledge are properly "handmaidens" to art, intellectual tools for enhancing the overall quality and value of human life and activity.3 This means that they are largely subordinate to the direct qualitative meaning of experience. They are, Dewey says, transformed in aesthetic experience in that they are "merged with non-intellectual elements to form an experience worth while as an experience."4 Art objects may well be the most potent and ready source of such enhanced, aesthetic experience, being intentionally created to refine and intensify in certain ways the experience of the perceiver. But they are not, to Dewey's way of thinking, the sole or even principal medium of the aesthetic. Art, he tells us, is best seen more liberally as "a quality that permeates an experience," whereby, in any number of life contexts, the meanings of objects and events become "the matter of a clarified, coherent, and intensified or 'impassioned' experience" (AE, 329, 295). If all of this can be taken to mean that art or the aesthetic, and not science, is paradigmatic of optimal human experience, then current efforts to integrate Dewey's aesthetics with his thinking about education are an important endeavor and one that should bear considerable fruit. Then, too, much of the popular literature in art and aesthetic education, which situates art and the aesthetic squarely within the cognitive domain of experience, is significantly at odds with Dewey's radically holistic and vigorously anti-elitist aesthetics.5Accordingly, this article will explore the idea of aesthetic education—conceived in its broadest sense—using a mainly Deweyan lens. Moreover, it will do so by examining everyday classroom practices as they are informed by the general... (shrink)

Manetti's account of dignitas and excellentia is covered in four books. The first three books praise the body, the soul and the body/soul composite. Manetti's last book turns from informing an audience to defeating opponents--from persuasion to polemic. He denounces a picture of human life so bleak that death seems better, and he retraces ground explored by the three previous books. The heart of his optimist Christian anthropology is a transcendent ideal, immortality: this is what makes imperfect, embodied (...) humans authentically like a perfect, bodiless God. Other facts about humans show that goodness--also a divine ideal--belongs naturally to them and their earthly world, governed by God with providential care. The natural state of humans is original justice, not original sin, which defiles nature but does not liquidate it. Human life on earth is happy, even joyous, made so by pleasures--including sexual pleasure--that are good and part of God's plan. A sublime piece of God's craftwork is the human body--including the naked body, outside and inside, guts and all--whose image in art is mankind's visible divinity, whether painted on a church wall or carved in antique marble. The art itself--like technology and other vehicles of material culture--manifests human thought in action. Energy, effort, ingenuity and invention are forces of cultural, intellectual and material progress.'Progressive' seems the right word--adjusted for time and place--to use about these attitudes of Manetti's. To call them enlightened is also fair to his ideas about dignitas, which are ideas rooted in antiquity and renewed in the Renaissance, not ideas about the dignity invented in the Enlightenment. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Dei Filius IV:On the Development of DogmaAndrew MeszarosIntroductionHistorically, it is indisputable that the intention of the latter part of chapter 4 of Dei Filius was to restate the substantial immutability of the deposit of faith, not for the sake of rejecting doctrinal development, but for the sake of establishing parameters for a certain profectus fidei—progress or development in the faith—which no Catholic theologian doubted, not even nineteenth-century neo-Scholastics. Then-contemporary (...) (e.g., John Henry Newman and the Tübingen school) and subsequent (e.g., Yves Congar and Henri de Lubac) theologians' theories that were more thoroughly worked out presupposed this immutability.The argument here is simple: Dei Filius's teaching on the immutability of dogma not only did serve as the necessary foundation for any sound (i.e., Catholic) theory of doctrinal development, but continues to do so. While the teaching of Dei Filius itself is limited and incomplete, it is essential. Furthermore, its key feature of dogmatic immutability is not compromised by even the most dramatic of doctrinal developments.To establish the ongoing relevance of Dei Filius for contemporary discussions on doctrinal development, I will first draw out certain key similarities between the nineteenth-century, modernist, and contemporary contexts. This will be followed by a presentation of the relevant portions of Dei Filius. Finally, in the longest section, I will discuss what is at stake in the teaching of Dei Filius and offer some different examples of how doctrines develop in ways that uphold the fundamental-theological principle laid out [End Page 909] in Dei Filius: namely, that all doctrinal development is homogenous with, or in continuity with, the deposit of faith.Anton Günther and Theology TodayWe can identify two major factors that led to the Vatican Council having to address dogmatic development. The first, and perhaps most important, factor is the implication that Anton Günther's (1783–1863) understanding of faith and reason had on dogma and its immutability. The second factor is simply the fact that, in the midst of these pervasive philosophical and theological disputes over faith and reason, Pius IX not only managed to define the Immaculate Conception as dogma, but did so by papal definition: the 1854 definition was the freshest example of what would later be defined in 1870.1 A brief examination of the thought of Günther will help us better understand why the paragraph on development (i.e., the immutability and progress of dogma) pertains to the faith–reason relationship and, hence, appears in the fourth chapter. 2Günther's major concern is a noble one: namely, to respond to the Kantian critique of supernatural religion. To do so, he sees it as necessary not only to defend rationally but also to explain rationally—according to the philosophical systems of Schelling and Hegel—Christian dogma. Günther is no brash and pure rationalist. He believes in the history of supernatural revelation. He acknowledges that reason alone could never discover supernaturally revealed truths; but, as a so-called semi-rationalist, he believes that, once made known to it, reason can then penetrate and, indeed, prove these revealed truths.3 [End Page 910]But if revealed mysteries are discoverable by human reason, then those same mysteries have to be interpreted in such a way that is, indeed, within the reach of reason using its proper resources.4 Not Scholasticism but German idealism—especially its category of self-consciousness—was Günther's vehicle for giving an account of the faith. Such a re-interpretation of Christian dogma according idealism's categories naturally alters the original understanding of that dogma. But for Günther, this reinterpretation is necessary if revelation is to be accessible to reason.So, for example, because modern psychology cannot make sense of a distinction between "person" and "nature" that is not coterminous, we must conclude, against Ephesus, that Christ is in fact a unity of two persons. Nor, for that matter, is the human person a composite of body and soul as defined by the Council of Vienne (1311–1312). Because God is self-conscious spirit, there is a process of trebling in God that tends toward... (shrink)

In his accounts of plant and animal generation Pierre Gassendi offers a mechanist story of how organisms create offspring to whom they pass on their traits. Development of the new organism is directed by a material “soul” or animula bearing ontogenetic information. Where reproduction is sexual, two sets of material semina and corresponding animulae meet and jointly determine the division, differentiation, and development of matter in the new organism. The determination of inherited traits requires a means of combining or (...) choosing among each parent's contributions, and towards this end, Gassendi outlines the nature of competition and dominance among animulae. Unlike his fellow mechanists, Gassendi can extend his mechanism to his heredity account, because his proposed vehicle for ontogenetic transmission is material. That proposal in turn relies on his atomist hypothesis. The relative uniformity of atoms allows animulae to operate equivalently across different modes of generation, spontaneous or otherwise. Further, his molecular model of atomic structures allows a material means of storing ontogenetic information received from the souls of parent organisms. These accounts—flawed and sketchy—unsurprisingly fail to specify how hereditary information might be borne physically, and in any case do not meet Gassendi's own empiricist standards. Yet this generation theory with pretensions to a materialist mechanism establishes Gassendi's firm commitment to a unity of the sciences through an atomist ontology that underlies all physical phenomena, including the organic. (shrink)

In his Commentary on the Timaeus Proclus says that in some occasions Plato speaks of a model (from which the world is created) that is identical to the Demiurge while in other occasions he suggests that the model is distinct from the Demiurge. Here, identity and difference refer to the similarity with or dissimilarity from the intelligible One, identified with eternity (stability; fixedness). However, Plato also speaks in the Timaeus that the Cosmos is pretty and its Constructor (the Demiurge) is (...) good inasmuch as He fixed his sight in the perpetual model. If we ask what is produced when the Demiurge fixed his sight in a model that it is not identical to Himself, we find the reply in the Timaeus: envy, defects, disorder, limitation regarding intelligence and the soul, incompleteness, ugliness, and imperfection. Plotinus, on his turn, mentions (Enneads, II.4) the existence of two types of matter, intelligible and sensible. The intelligible or divine matter is equivalent to the "indefinite Dyad", identified with the procession of the Noûs. For Plotinus, though the intelligible matter is eternal and invariant, its archê is constituted by difference and movement - conditions that prepare the naturation of sensible matter. For Proclus, the Soul, an unfolding of the Noûs, mediates between the Intellect, intelligible matter and sensible matter. Many interpreters seem to have understood inteligible matter as the matter of the Soul, and to explain the interaction between the intelligible and the sensible many theories have appeared regarding the constitution of intelligible matter and about the nature of the "vehicle" or "vehicles" that would be associated with the Soul's "descent" and incarnation. (shrink)

Even though Heimarmene is the natural order of things, as it is claimed in the Laws; and although the human being has to participate in that order, as it is written in Timaeus; Plato, at times, tends to be willing to rupture that circle of necessity, that the "naturality" of Heimarmene enforces on man, by finding a potential escape. The human soul is the unambiguous vehicle of this effort. In the writings of the Stoic Seneca, the transcendence of (...) Fate is a matter correlated with the human life and with moral responsibility. His philosophical aim is focused on overcoming the existential conditions which render man a subjugated as well as a non eudaimonistic being. In both philosophers we diagnose a common theoretical orientation: to break through the limitations that Fate imposes on man's freedom in the material world. Certainly there is a difference in the degree, frequency and depth that this is critically established in their thought. In our paper, we mean to: a) ascertain this, b) examine the role of the soul, and c) to recognize the ground where "Paideia" may initiate the transcendence of Fate by human means solely. (shrink)