Table Of ContentCommon to Body and Soul
Common to Body and Soul
Philosophical Approaches
to Explaining Living Behaviour
in Greco-Roman Antiquity
Edited by
R.A.H. King
Waiter de Gruyter . Berlin' New York
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Acknowledgments
This collection of essays owes its inception to a symposium held in Munich
8-lOth September 2003, whose purpose was to bring together scholars
working in the field to discuss some aspects of the philosophy of mind in
antiquity that may conveniently be subsumed under the rubric "common
to body and soul". All but one of the papers presented here were read,
in earlier versions, at the symposium, Thomas Johansen's piece being the
exception. None of them has appeared in its present form in print before.
The editor has translated Pierre-Marie Morel's and Thomas Buchheim's
papers into English.
Many people and institutions were instrumental in making the sympo-
sium possible; the editor would like to express his gratitude to the follow-
ing. The Fritz Thyssen Stiftung gave very generous financial support to
the symposium. The Gesellschaft fur antike Philosophie also supported
the undertaking. U rsula Steiner was most helpful in making the three
days at Kardinal Wendel Haus, where the symposium was held, very en-
joyable. Thomas Brunotte was of great assistance both at the symposium
itself, and also in preparing the book for publication. He is responsible
for the camera ready copy and the indexes to the volume. Its publication
has been subsidised by Lehrstuhl III (Thomas Buchheim), Philosophie
Department, LMU Munich. Sabine Vogt, who also took part in the sym-
posium, has been exemplary as editor at de Gruyter. Finally, the volume's
editor would like to thank most warmly all participants in the symposium
for their participation, and all contributors to this collection for their
contributions.
R. A. H. King / Munich, September 2005
Contents
Introduction (R. A. H. King) .......................................... 1
Parmenides on Thinking (Edward Hussey) ........................... 13
Parmenides on the Place of Mind (Roman Dilcher) .................. 31
Life Beyond the Stars:
Aristotle, Plato and Empedodes (Denis O'Brien) .................... 49
Plato's phaulon skemma:
On the Multifariousness of the Human Soul (Thomas Buchheim) ... 103
"Common to Soul and Body"
in the Parva Naturalia (Pierre-Marie Morel) ........................ 121
What's New in the De Sensu? The Place of the De Sensu
in Aristotle's Psychology (Thomas K. Johansen) .................... 140
Common to Body and Soul:
Peripatetic Approaches After Aristotle (Robert W. Sharples) ....... 165
Interaction of Body and Soul: What the Hellenistic
Philosophers Saw and Aristotle Avoided (Christof Rapp) ........... 187
Psychophysical Holism
in Stoicism and Epicureanism (Christopher Gill) ................... 209
Body and Soul in Galen (R. J. Hankinson) .......................... 232
Contributors ....................................................... 259
Index locorum ...................................................... 261
General Index ...................................................... 275
Introduction *
R.A.H. King
Greco-Roman antiquity provides a wide variety of models of the relations
between body and soul, and some of the most notable are associated with
the phrase "common to body and soul" . This phrase is a commonplace of
ancient philosophical psychology, that is the doctrines and investigations
of the soul (psyche), both human and in general. Versions of the phrase
occur in Plato, Aristotle, and finally in Plotinus. Epicureans, Stoics and
Galen were intimately concerned with problems connected conceptually, if
not linguistically, with things common to body and soul. The ten papers
collected here present a snapshot of current research by workers in the
field. No attempt has been made at a systematic coverage, for this would
require not merely more of a history of philosophical psychology than is at
present agreed on, but also more connections between ancient and modern
thought than may safely be taken for granted. For example, substantial
dualism cannot be understood independently of the doctrine of substance
in question. As will be seen, alternative points of view are presented in the
collection, and this introduction will not attempt a final adjudication. I
begin with a brief sketch of the options discussed, and then present them
in a little more detail.
Soul (psyche) is, roughly, what distinguishes living things from other
things. The importance of things common to body and soul lies in the
fact that neither in philosophical nor everyday encounters are we usually
faced with soul on its own. Body-soul couples, what they do and what
they undergo, are much more in evidence. To see that this is so, we have
only to consider the fundamental explananda of psychology - movement,
including action, and cognition, more especially perception. This is not to
suggest that there is no point in distinguishing between body and soul -
all of the thinkers considered here do so in a variety of ways.
Both what may be common to soul varies, as does what it means to be
common to body and soul. The subjects which may be common are states,
generally speaking, or more specifically functions. The whole life of the
embodied substance may be involved. In contrast, it is in fact remarkably
Many thanks to Thomas Buchheim for his comments on an earlier version.
2 R.A.H. King
difficult to present mental activity in the absence of body - as becomes
clear from the two papers which discuss such theories. Roman Dilcher's
view of Parmenides on thinking presents a transcendent intellect, whereas
Denis O'Brien's account discusses an early layer in Aristotle's thought
displaying bodiless gods living beyond the world.
One approach to the varieties of partnership between body and soul
envisaged by different theorists is through styles of explanation. From a
modern perspective, causal interaction is the most obvious way in which
things may be common to body and soul- here represented in antiquity by
materialist theories of the soul. They differ from modern versions in that
both aspects of the interaction only occur in the interacting whole. Body
and soul are not considered as separable substances, but as aspects of a
whole. Hellenistic philosophers are important representatives of this line
of thought, as shown by Christ of Rapp and Christopher Gill. Weaker ver-
sions of body soul partnership include co-variation as in Edward Hussey's
presentation of Parmenides.
A second group of theories insists on teleological explanation for living
things. Here, an important idea is that body is an instrument of the soul.
Such a teleological relation is to be found in the theories of both Aristotle
and Plato. In Plato, there are those things which can only be striven
for by body-soul composites, such as the good life. Such striving only
makes sense when there are active tendencies of the soul, which include
bodily aspects, which can be ordered in the right way. For Aristotle the
body is the organ of the soul, and so related to it as to a good or end.
In both Plato and Aristotle, this insistence on teleology leaves room for
much work interpreting what their positions actually imply for states and
actions common to body and soul.
In Parmenides either thought and perception are explained by the
mixture of the body (Edward Hussey) or thought transcends body and
so has nothing in common with it (Roman Dilcher). The first option cor-
responds to the view that Presocratics subscribe to a naIve materialism,
which holds that all there is, is in some way material; this is also the view
of Love and Soul to be found in Empedocles (Denis O'Brien). For Plato
the function of soul is to organise body, and corporeal life, in accordance
with the idea of the good; and so it is neither form nor body (Thomas
Buchheim). This is the purpose of his division of the soul into three active
tendencies. Galen adopts this theory, but quite reasonably concludes that
empirical investigation cannot establish if the soul is body or immaterial,
although it can discover the soul's locations and the material transmission
of its powers (R. J. Hankinson).
