Body and Soul in Hellenistic Philosophy

274 Pages·2020·1.77 MB·English

by  Brad Inwood, James Warren

BODY AND SOUL IN HELLENISTIC
PHILOSOPHY
PhilosophersanddoctorsfromtheperiodimmediatelyafterAristotle
downtothesecondcenturycewereparticularlyfocusedontheclose
relationships of soul and body. Such relationships are particularly
intimatewhenthesoulisunderstoodtobeamaterialentity,asitwas
byEpicureansandStoics;butevenAristoteliansandPlatonistsshared
theconvictionthatbodyandsoulinteractinwaysthataffectthewell
beingofthelivinghumanbeing.Thesephilosopherswereinterested
inthenatureofthesoul,itsstructure,anditspowers.Theywerealso
interested in the place of the soul within a general account of the
world.Thisleadstoimportantquestionsaboutthepropermethods
bywhichweshouldinvestigatethenatureofthesoulandtheappro
priate relationships among natural philosophy, medicine, and psy
chology.Thisvolume,partofthe Symposium Hellenisticumseries,
featurestenscholarsaddressingdifferentaspectsofthistopic.
brad inwood istheWilliamLampsonProfessorofPhilosophyand
ClassicsatYaleUniversity.HismajorworksincludeEthicsandHuman
ActioninEarlyStoicism(1985),ThePoemofEmpedocles(2nded.2001),
Reading Seneca: Stoic Philosophy at Rome (2005), Seneca: Selected
Philosophical Letters (2007), Ethics after Aristotle (2014), and Stoicism:
A Very Short Introduction (2018). He has edited or coedited several
volumes, including The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics
(Cambridge,2003),andfrom2007to2015hewastheeditorofOxford
Studies in Ancient Philosophy. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of
CanadaandamemberoftheAmericanAcademyofArtsandSciences.
jameswarrenisProfessorofAncientPhilosophyattheUniversityof
CambridgeandaFellowofCorpusChristiCollege.Heistheauthorof
Epicurus and Democritean Ethics (Cambridge, 2002), Facing Death:
Epicurus and His Critics (2004), Presocratics (2007), and The Pleasures
of Reason in Plato, Aristotle, and the Hellenistic Hedonists (Cambridge,
2014). He is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Epicureanism
(2009), with Frisbee Sheffield; The Routledge Companion to Ancient
Philosophy (2014); and with Jenny Bryan and Robert Wardy, Authors
andAuthoritiesinAncientPhilosophy(Cambridge,2018).

BODY AND SOUL IN
HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHY
edited by
BRAD INWOOD
YaleUniversity,Connecticut
JAMES WARREN
UniversityofCambridge
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description:Cambridge,UnitedKingdom;NewYork,NY,USA:CambridgeUniversity
Press,2020.|Includesbibliographicalreferencesandindex.
identifiers:lccn2019058313(print)|lccn2019058314(ebook)|isbn9781108485821
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Contents
ListofContributors pagevi
ListofAbbreviations vii
Introduction 1
BradInwoodandJamesWarren
1. HellenisticMedicine,StratoofLampsacus,
andAristotle’sTheoryofSoul 9
SylviaBerryman
2. HerophilusandErasistratusontheHēgemonikon 30
DavidLeith
3. GalenonSoul,MixtureandPneuma 62
PhilipvanderEijk
4. ThePartitionoftheSoul:Epicurus,Demetrius
Lacon,andDiogenesofOinoanda 89
FrancescoVerde
5. CosmicandIndividualSoulinEarlyStoicism 113
FrancescoAdemollo
6. Soul,Pneuma,andBlood:TheStoicConceptionoftheSoul 145
ChristelleVeillard
7. ThePlatonicSoul,fromtheEarlyAcademy
totheFirstCenturyce 171
JanOpsomer
8. CiceroontheSoul’sSensationofItself:Tusculans1.49–76 199
J.P.F.Wynne
Bibliography 231
IndexLocorum 252
SubjectIndex 262
v
Contributors
francesco ademollo, Associate Professor of the History of Ancient
Philosophy,UniversityofFlorence
sylvia berryman, Professor of Philosophy, University of British
Columbia
brad inwood, ProfessorofPhilosophyandClassics,YaleUniversity
david leith, SeniorLecturerinClassics,UniversityofExeter
jan opsomer, ProfessorofPhilosophy,UniversityofLeuven
philip van der eijk, Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Classics
andHistoryofScience,HumboldtUniversity,Berlin
christelle veillard, Maître de Conférences, University of Paris
Nanterre
francesco verde, Assistant Professor of the History of Ancient
Philosophy,SapienzaUniversityofRome
james warren, Professor of Ancient Philosophy and Fellow of Corpus
ChristiCollege,Cambridge
j.p.f.wynne,AssociateProfessorofClassics,UniversityofUtah
vi
Abbreviations
Forabbreviationsofancientauthorsandworks,seetheIndexlocorum.
DG H.Diels(1879)Doxographigraeci,Berlin
DK H. Diels and W. Kranz (1952) Die Fragmente der
Vorsokratiker,6thedition,Berlin
EK L. Edelstein and I. G. Kidd (1988–99) Posidonius 3 vols.,
Cambridge
FHS&G William W. Fortenbaugh, Pamela M. Huby, Robert
W. Sharples and Dimitri Gutas (1993) Theophrastus of
Eresus: Sources for His Life, Writings, Thought and Influence
2vols.,Leiden
K. C.G.Kühn(1921–33)ClaudiiGaleniOperaOmnia22vols.,
Leipzig
LS A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley (1987) The Hellenistic
Philosophers2vols.,Cambridge
LSJ H. G. Liddell, R. Scott, and H. S. Jones (1925–1940)
AGreek-EnglishLexicon,9thedition,Oxford
OLD OxfordLatinDictionary,2ndedition,Oxford,2012
PHerc. HerculaneumPapyrus
POxy OxyrhynchusPapyrus
SSR G. Giannantoni (1990) Socratis et socraticorum reliquiae,
Naples
SVF H. von Arnim (1903–5) Stoicorum veterum fragmenta,
Stuttgart
Us. H.Usener(1887)Epicurea,Leipzig
vii

Introduction
Brad Inwood and James Warren
Therelationshipofsoultobodywasoneoftheearliestandmostpersistent
questionsinancientthought.ItemergesintheHomericpoems,wherethe
psuchēisabreath-likestuffthatanimatesthehumanbeinguntilitdeparts
atdeathfortheunderworld,leavingthecorpse(sōmaornekros)behind.In
the Odyssey these souls are found lurking wraith-like in the underworld
until they are revitalised by a sacrifice of blood which gives them
a temporary power to think and speak again. Among Pythagoreans and
others,the soullives imprisoned inthebody untilit is liberatedatdeath,
onlytobereincarnatedforanewlifeinanewbodyinaccordancewithits
merits. Plato embraces this theory in several of his dialogues, but even
though the soul is a relatively autonomous substance it is nevertheless
deeplyaffectedbytheconditionsofthebodyitinhabitsduringlifeandthe
choicesthisembodiedsoulmakes.OtherearlyGreekthinkersregardedthe
soul as little more than the life force animating a body, a special kind of
material stuff that accounts for the functions of a living animal but then
disperses at death. Democritean atomism embraced this notion of soul,
whichwasalsocommoninthemedicaltradition.Aristotle’sanalysisofall
substancesintoformandmatterfacilitatedtheidentificationofsoulwith
the form of a suitably organised body, a form responsible for all of the
abilitiesandcapacities(dunameis)thatconstitutethelifeofanylivingthing
(bothplantsandanimals).
Itmayappear,inthatcase,thatonceAristotlecametoofferhisview,the
general landscape of accounts of the relationship between body and soul
was more or less fully mapped out. On one side there are those accounts
which hold that the soul is itself a kind of body, perhaps a particularly
volatileorrarefiedbodybutabodynonetheless.Ontheothersidethereare
thosewhoinsistthatthereisaradicaldifferenceinkindbetweensoulsand
bodies.Bodiesareperceptible,physicallyextended,andresistanttotouch,
whilesoulsaretobeunderstoodaslackingallofthesefeaturesandinstead
beingintelligibleand,onsomeviews,abletoexistentirelyindependently
1
2 brad inwood and james warren
of any body. Somewhere between these two broad camps there are those
thinkerswhofollowAristotleinhishylomorphicanalysisandhisviewthat
‘thesoulisneitherwithoutabodynorisitabody’(DeAnima2.2,414a19–
20). And we can perhaps also add as a distinct group those thinkers who
made the soul dependent on a body or a certain arrangement of bodily
matter but not itself a body, including those ‘harmony’ theorists invoked
bySocratesinPlato’sPhaedo(85e–86d)andthenagainbyAristotleinthe
De Anima (1.2, 407b27–408a28). All of these views had been presented,
revised,attacked,anddefendedbythebeginningoftheHellenisticperiod
andthevariousauthorsonwhomtheessaysinthiscollectionconcentrate
were all well-informed about the relatively long history of the problems
theycontinuedtodiscuss.
The essays gathered in this volume explore Greek and Roman theories
abouttherelationshipofsoulandbodyinthecenturiesafterAristotle.All
theessayshavetheirorigininpaperspresentedatthefourteenthtriennial
SymposiumHellenisticum,heldattheUniversityofUtrechtinJuly2016.
They cover connected issues that arise among philosophers and doctors
from the period immediately after Aristotle down to the second century
ce.Doctors fromHerophilustoGalenarecovered,asarerepresentatives
of the Peripatetic,Epicurean, Stoic, and Platonisttraditions. Buildingon
theachievementsofearlierGreekthinkers,thesedoctorsandphilosophers
wereparticularlyfocusedonthecloserelationshipsofsoulandbody;such
relationships are particularly intimate when the soul is understood to be
a material entity, as it was by Epicurean atomists and by Stoics; but even
hylomorphists(suchasmanyAristotelians)andsubstancedualists(suchas
manyPlatonists)sharetheconvictionthatbodyandsoulinteractinways
thataffectthewell-beingandmoralconditionofthelivinghumanbeing.
Thesephilosopherscontinuedtopursuethequestionoftherelationship
betweenthesoulandthebodybyconsideringitinavarietyofdifferentbut
interrelated philosophical contexts. They were interested in the central
questionofthenatureofthesoul,itsstructure,anditspowers.Theywere
also interested in the place of the soul within a general account of the
world. This leads to important questions about the proper methods by
which we should investigate the nature of the soul and the appropriate
relationships among natural philosophy, medicine, and psychology.
Insofarasquestionsabouttheworldasawholemaysometimesalsoinvolve
questionsoftheology,astheycertainlydidinthecaseoftheStoics,itisalso
easy to see how an account of the relationship between the body and
the soul will easily lead into considerations of the relationship between
theindividualhumansoulandadivinesoulorthesoulofthecosmos(‘the