Ancient Theories of the Soul

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

The aim of the course is to render the students familiar with the most complex theories of the soul that were developed in antiquity and help them to study the validity and the soundness of the arguments developed in favor of them. While ancient philosophy did not yet grasp the radical difference between first-person and third-person approaches to the life of the mind, its attempts to understand the nature of the soul are very rich and at variance with each other. We will gain an overview of the theories of the soul by probably the three greatest ancient philosophers, Plato's, Aristotle's and Augustine's (while we will ignore the materialist conceptions of the Epicureans and the Stoics, Aristotle will teach us much about pre-Socratic notions). We will first read Plato's Phaedo, a dialogue in which Socrates, shortly before his execution, discusses arguments for and against the immortality of the soul. In this context, his theory of the Forms plays a crucial role. We will also have to discuss the difficult hermeneutic question of how Plato’s own opinions can be traced based on those of his dialogue’s interlocutors. For he himself does not appear in the Phaedo or in any of his dialogues. We will spend most of the semester with Aristotle's treatise On the Soul and his so-called Parva naturalia, a collection of short essays dealing with mental phenomena such as sensation, memory, dreaming etc. An important difference between Plato and Aristotle is that the latter develops his philosophical psychology in accordance with his philosophical biology and thus connects the various types and activities of the soul with different organic functions. He furthermore uses basic concepts from his new metaphysics to elucidate the nature of the soul. Finally, we will see how two short treatises by the young Augustine try to combine Platonic ideas with the new Christian beliefs.