MIND AND BODY - Some Aspects of Medieval Natural Philosophy (original) (raw)
Related papers
A History of Mind and Body in Late Antiquity
2018
What is a soul? What is a body? What is a mind? How do these relate within the human being? Is the soul-body relationship antagonistic or complementary? For example, is the soul weighed down and imprisoned by the body, or aided by it and defined in relation to it? How do we think, and how are we aware of our own thoughts? How should bodily pleasure feature in our lives? If the mind is supposed to focus on and contemplate intelligible reality, how can it achieve this? What is the role of God, of the body, and of literature in the soul's attempts at contemplation? Throughout late antiquity, philosophers and theologians grappled creatively with mind-body issues, asking a diverse range of questions and giving answers often of striking originality and of abiding significance. Philosophical anthropological reflections about the nature of body, soul, and mind prompted and interacted with ethical and epistemological questions. The aim of this volume is to present together pagan and Christian ideas about mind and body in late antiquity, from roughly the 2 nd through the 6 th centuries. The mind-body relation is broadly conceived to include the soul-body relation. We explore a wide, interacting community of thinkers, mainly writing in Greek and in some cases in Latin. Our primary focus is on philosophical approaches to mind-body questions; however, a chapter from Edward Watts sheds light on their historical setting, and some contributors deploy less self-consciously philosophical sources, such as sermons and liturgy. This breadth of approach demonstrates the widespread significance of mind-body questions, which extended far beyond philosophical communities, and helps to bring out the historical specificity of late ancient enquiry into mind-body questions. It will also widen the range of likely interest in our volume, to secondarily include those whose concern is more social and historical than theological and philosophical. The mind-body relation was at the forefront of philosophy and theology in late antiquity. In addressing it, late ancient thinkers were partly picking up on themes from earlier antiquity. However, new contexts and ideas cast these themes in a fresh light: Plotinus' thought, especially his metaphysics and cosmology, reinvigorated Platonism and arguably sent it in a new direction; the rise of asceticism in the third and fourth centuries both accentuated the ethical aspects of mind-body questions and further grounded them in an intensely practical context; late antiquity saw the growth of Christianity. It thus fostered a social and political context in which pagan and Christian authors existed side by side, engaging with, disputing, and influencing each other against the backdrop of each community's fluctuating political fortunes. Late antiquity is a period of unique import for Christian-pagan interaction. It is also, relatedly, a bridge between the ancient and medieval worlds. Late ancient ideas are of enduring importance. This volume addresses a vital section of them. Across the period in question, mind-body issues were bound up with cosmological ones: to ask how the soul relates to the body is partly to ask how an intelligible, rational entity exists in the physical world. In Neoplatonic thought, the cosmological framework of mind-body questions was being reconfigured, thanks partly to a renewed emphasis on divine transcendence. If the divine is removed from the intelligible sphere, the soul may then be far removed from the body as it stretches up towards the now-distant divine. The soul may, equally, be pushed closer to the body because both, together, are sharply distinguished from the divine. In either case, the soul must interact with the body. This plays out in various ways. Early Neoplatonism often exhibits a strong, though complex, anthropological dualism; this can be seen giving way to a more positive approach to embodiment in later Neoplatonism. Paralleling questions of downwards interaction – how do the soul and mind relate to the body? – were questions of upwards interaction – how do soul and mind relate to other intelligibles and to transcendent reality? Correspondingly, this period also saw increasing introspection about the
The Influence of Bodily Changes on the Soul in Medieval Physiognomy
In this paper, the link between body and soul will be studied within the framework of medieval physiognomy. Starting point will be (ps.-)Aristotle's Physiognomonica, of which the medieval Latin translation became the authority in the field. This translation started a chain of commentaries, which tried to explain some of the obscure or concise passages. On the basis of three of these commentaries (by William of Aragon, John Buridan and William of Mirica), the mutual influence of body and soul will be examined, with a special focus on the influence of disease. The main question of this paper is whether a disease or any other bodily alteration has any influence on the soul, and consequently on the physiognomical analysis.
The Soul-Body Problem at Paris ca 1200-1250. Hugh of St-Cher and His Contemporaries
Reviews: J. Lambinet, REVUE PHILOSOPHIQUE DE LOUVAIN 111.2 (May 2013), p. 430-433; E. Sweeney, SPECULUM 88.1 (2013), p. 255-257., 2010
The soul-body problem was among the most controversial issues discussed in 13th century Europe, and it continues to capture much attention today as the quest to understand human identity becomes more and more urgent. What made the discussion about this problem particularly interesting in the scholastic period was the tension between the traditional dualist doctrines and a growing need to affirm the unity of the human being. This debate is frequently interpreted as a conflict between the ‘new' philosophy, conveyed by the rediscovered works of Aristotle and his followers, and doctrinal requirements, especially the belief in the soul's immortality. However, a thorough examination of Parisian texts, written between approximately 1150 and 1260, leads us to conclusions which may seem surprising. In this book, the study and edition of some little-known texts of Hugh of St-Cher and his contemporaries reveals an extremely rich and colourful picture of the Parisian anthropological debate of the time. This book also offers an opportunity to reconsider some received views concerning medieval philosophy, such as the conviction that the notion of ‘person' did not play any major role in the anthropological controversies. The study covers a wide range of authors, from Gilbert of Poitiers to Thomas Aquinas, and it is partly based on previously unedited material, published for the first time in the Appendix.
Soul and Body in Seventeenth-Century British Philosophy
The Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century, 2013
Ideas about soul and body – about thinking or remembering, mind and life, brain and self – remain both diverse and controversial in our neurocentric age. The history of these ideas is significant both in its own right and to aid our understanding of the complex sources and nature of our concepts of mind, cognition, and psychology, which are all terms with puzzling, difficult histories. These topics are not the domain of specialists alone, and studies of emotion, perception, or reasoning have never been isolated theoretical endeavours. As Francis Bacon described human philosophy or ‘the knowledge of our selves’, within which he located the study of body, soul, and mind, it ‘deserveth the more accurate handling, by how much it toucheth us more nearly’ (1605/ 2000: 93). The history of ideas in these domains is particularly challenging given the practical dimensions and implications of theories of mind. Because theories of human nature and debates about body and mind do ‘touch us’ so ‘nearly’, they attract and can thus reveal, in specific historical contexts, interconnected discourses or associations which may be quite unlike our own. This chapter retains a focus, however, on the history of theories of mind: we address an array of distinctive positi ons inmetaphysics and psychology which emerged in wider British debate, each with potential religious, moral, and political implications. We proceed by selectively surveying the conceptual inheritance and challenges for British philosophers in the early seventeenth century with regard to both the soul and the humoral temperament of body and mind. We look at some of the eclectic systems developed by British philosophers of the soul in the mid-century period, and at different ways new ideas in both medicine and metaphysics were integrated.
Hardly anything seems more ordinary than the extended, concrete bodies populating the world of experience. Yet in explaining their manifest properties, physicists must appeal to entities radically unlike the bodies of our experience. Medieval Aristotelians too struggled to resolve tensions between the characteristics of the bodies we experience (corporeality), and the principle that accounts for the way bodies are (matter). This panel uncovers key difficulties that theorists of the High Middle Ages encountered when deploying Aristotelian notions of body to account for the bodies we experience. It thus offers a new window onto the fraying and reweaving of medieval paradigms of the physical world in the thirteenth century. The first three papers examine tensions within medieval paradigms of corporeality. Neil Lewis will explore medieval attempts to fit ‘body’ into the Aristotelian categorial scheme by distinguishing body as substance and quantified body. David Cory will examine the emergence of a ‘dual explanation’ of physical phenomena in terms of materiality and corporeality. Nicola Polloni will show how this duality raised questions about matter’s (un)knowability, putting its physical function into tension with its metaphysical limitations. The last two papers treat two cases, concerning bodily properties, that challenged Aristotelian paradigms among thirteenth-century Christian and Islamic intellectuals. Therese Cory will examine how Parisian theorists sought to integrate light into their paradigm of corporeality. Emma Gannagé will examine how the post-Avicennian medical tradition handled the problem of bodies exhibiting secondary qualities (magnetism or healing properties) beyond those manifested by all bodies in common.
A Literary History of the 'Soul and Body' Theme in Medieval England
2018
This dissertation seeks to reconstruct the development of the literary ‘Soul and Body’ theme over time. This theme is preserved and developed in several medieval English texts, both in prose and verse, dating from the tenth to the fifteenth century. Central to this theme is an opposition between the eternal soul and the decaying body; this opposition was eleborated both in the form of a monologue in which the soul accuses a silent body and in the form of a debate in which the two sides dispute over the responsibility for sin and eternal damnation. The first part of the Introduction offers a brief overview of the previous scholarship, highlighting the need for a more comprehensive treatment of the theme. The Introduction also outlines its origins, which have been traced by nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars to the earliest century of the Christian era in the Mediterranean area. My methodological model for the study of how traditional material was reworked is Ernst Robert Curtius, and his concept of the topos. To analyse in detail how the Soul and Body topos changed over time, I break the topos down into smaller motifs, which constitute its ‘building blocks’. Using this methodological approach, the first chapter proposes a classification of the various ‘Soul and Body’ texts of the Old English period into three groups, which are characterized by the occurrence of several shared motifs. The crystallization of these motifs into a structured and recognized sub-genre in the early Middle English phase is the focus of Chapter 2. The third chapter discusses how this sub-genre became part of the wider genre of medieval debate poetry between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries. Finally, the results of the investigation carried out in the present dissertation are summarized in a general conclusion.