This paper attempts to explain the theory of the body as seen by I.P. Culianu. Thus, starting from the idea that the soul is full of body – which is motivated by theories in the domain of fashion – through which the body is that which assumes the defining symbolic charge of the spirit which inhabits it. Reversing the order of things, if one looks in the latter portions of the vast work of I.P. Culianu the perspective may be found (...) according to which the body, even if not full of the soul, may at least be defined as a prolongation of the mind, that is, as the real engine of history and culture. (shrink)

What would Christianity be like without the soul? While most people would expect the Christian bible to reveal a highly traditional opposition of matter and spirit, the spirit forces of the Old and New Testaments are often surprisingly physical, dynamic, and practical, a matter of energy as much as ethics. The Secret History of the Soul examines the forgotten or suppressed models of body, soul, and human consciousness found in the literature, philosophy and scripture of the ancient and classical worlds. (...) It shows how the spirit forces of Homer, Plato, Aristotle, and the Old and New Testaments tended to be quantities not entities, and to be closely bound up with the dynamic physical flux of the human body, rather than cleanly abstracted in some absolute immaterial realm. Forces such as menos and thymos, nephesh, pneuma and dynamis not only blurred the line between body and soul, but were potent and transferable, being used, in New Testament culture, to effect magical cures or bestow magical power. Related to this surprising lack of body-soul dualism is a lack of dualistic afterlife in either Homer or Hebrew scripture, where Hades and Sheol are the sole post-mortem destinations. The Secret History of the Soul restores the living strangeness of a spirit world filled with potent energy and practical magic, in cultures which had not yet glimpsed the abstracted soul of later Christianity. (shrink)

It has long been thought that Augustine holds that corporeal objects cannot act upon incorporeal souls. However, precisely how and why Augustine imposes limitations upon the causal powers of corporeal objects remains obscure. In this paper, the author clarifies Augustine’s views about the causal and dependence relations between body and soul. He argues that, contrary to what is often thought, Augustine allows that corporeal objects do act upon souls and merely rules out that corporeal objects exercise a particular kind of (...) causal power (that of efficient or sustaining causes). He clarifies how Augustine conceives of the kind of causal influence exercised by souls and bodies. (shrink)

The modal argument for the existence of a Cartesian human soul proposed by Richard Swinburne more than thirty years ago, if slightly adjusted and interpreted correctly, becomes a plausible argument for anyone who accepts modal arguments. The difficulty consists in a relatively weak justification of the second premise, of the real possibility of a disembodied existence, as a result of which the argument does not provide a real proof. The argument is best understood in the following terms: Special divine action (...) is excluded from the metaphysical possibilities and only the natural possibilities are considered; the “conceivable” possibility of the existence of a person without a body is interpreted as a metaphysical possibility, and inductive support for its reality is provided by apparent first-person-conceivability of a disembodied existence, detailed descriptions of out-of-body and near-death experiences, a priori trust in introspection in psychology and the cognitive sciences, and by the unity of consciousness and the possibility of its extension to peripersonal space; statements about having a soul or being a material substance are excluded from the domain of the premises; and finally, one accepts the Kripkean principle that having a body or a soul is an essential component of a person. If these conditions are met, the argument is valid, and the conclusion is made more plausible by Swinburne’s modal argument than it would be without it.Argumentum modale pro animae humanae “Cartesianae” existentia, quod R. Swinburne ante plures quam 30 annos proposuit, acceptabile reddi potest cuicumque argumenta modalia non generatim respuenti, si paululum emendetur recteque intelligatur. Omnis huius argumenti diffi cultas consistit in iustifi catione debiliore secundae eius praemissae, quo pacto argumentum ineffi cax redditur. Argumentum vero optime intelligetur his quattuor punctis animadversis: Primo, possibilitas metaphysica non nisi possibilitates naturales comprehendere intelligatur, omni speciali Dei ingerentia exclusa. Secundo, personae possibilitas “conceptibilis” sine corpore existendi intelligatur ut realis possibilitas metaphysica. Cui realitati argumenta favent inductiva tum ex possibilitate imaginandi existentiam sine corpore; tum ex minutatim enarratis testimoniis experiendi status “extra corpus” et “prope mortem”; tum ex fi de fundamentali veritatis introspectionis in psychologia scientiis que cognitivis; tum ex unitate conscientiae ac possibilitate eam in spatium extra corpus extendendi. Tertio, e praemissarum congerie assertiones excludantur quibus homo animam habere vel substantiam materialem esse assumeretur. Quarto, principium S. Kripkii accipiatur, scil. corporis vel animae habitum personae essentialem esse debere. His omnibus servatis argumentum Swinburnii validum evadit, conclusionem suam plus credibilem reddens quam secus esset. (shrink)

A number of recent authors have raised the question of Leibniz’s commitment, during the 1680s and after, to the reality of corporeal substances. In contrast to the standard reading of him as embracing early on a view of substance which is in all essential respects that of the “Monadology”, it has been argued that Leibniz is in fact inclined to recognize two distinct types of substance: on the one hand, unextended soul-like substances ; on the other hand, quasi-Aristotelian corporeal substances. (...) Some commentators have seen Leibniz as deciding definitively by the late 1690s in favor of the monadic theory. Others, however, have argued for a more complicated reading of his development, seeing Leibniz as struggling with the problem of corporeal substance for much of his career. (shrink)

We intend to point out that in the Gorgias, dialogue devoted to the critique of rhetoric, Socrates' frequent allusions to the body's complexion, and the recurrent use of corporeal metaphors to refer to what, by analogy, happens to the soul, function as a rhetoric tool in order to oppose Gorgias' own rhetoric. Thus, while drawing attention to the way Plato uses the weapons of the adversary precisely to attack him, we emphasize the indispensable role of the body as evidence of (...) the soul in Platonic philosophy. Therefore, our intent is to reinforce the interpretive strand according to which Plato can be understood more as a thinker who departs from the pressing problems of his time in order to lead us into philosophical reflections – in the present dialogue, the political consequences of a _paideia _oriented by sophistic rhetoric –, than as a philosopher solely committed to a transcendent metaphysics. (shrink)

The United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, resulting from the work of John Ruggie and his team, largely depend on state action and corporate good will for their implementation. One increasingly popular way for states to prevent and redress violations of human rights committed by companies outside their country of registration is to adopt measures with extraterritorial implications, some of which are presented in the article, or to assert direct extraterritorial jurisdiction in specific instances. Some United Nations (...) human rights bodies and non-governmental organisations are clearly supporting the use of extraterritoriality and have argued that international human rights law places an obligation on states to embrace extraterritoriality so as to better control the activities of companies registered on their territories. In this context, the article aims to determine whether extraterritoriality is the magic potion that will help enhance corporate accountability for human rights violations committed overseas. The article explores whether such obligation exists and, beyond this, whether extraterritoriality should be further encouraged. (shrink)

In an environment where astrology was widely respected, Plotinus accepted the role of heavenly bodies in answering prayer. Considering them divine, he denied them the use of memory (iv 4, 6-8); how then could he explain response to prayer received after an interval of time? Plotinus was also concerned to deny attributing intentionality in any response given, for good or evil, since that would make the astral deities responsible also for morally dubious answers. In his treatment of the issue in (...) this passage, Plotinus draws on a lengthy earlier discussion of the role of memory in the soul’s thinking and knowing (iv 3, 25-iv 4, 12), as associated primarily with that which exists in time and is characterized by αἴσθησις, i.e., the lower soul belonging to the composite living being (iv 3, 25.12-14; iv 4, 16-17). If astral deities have bodies, these are of a highly refined fiery nature, and can be affected only inasmuch as they participate in the cosmic circuit. What suppliants may regard as intentional response must therefore be understood as the effect of a type of ‘linking’ of the universe as a living organism in which all parts are coordinated in an interrelationship characterized by sympathy. This is why answers to prayer represent no more than the unintended reaction of natural forces in the universe, the very same forces also responsible for effective use of magic. If Plotinus does not assign much value to prayer, he does recognize that, as with magic, such incantations may have a harmful effect, if only for the lower soul. He therefore warns the wise person to guard against such outcomes by focusing the soul in its contemplation of what is higher, i.e., its inner life. (shrink)

Interpretations of Aristotle's account of the relation between body and soul have been widely divergent. At one extreme, Thomas Slakey has said that in theDe Anima‘Aristotle tries to explain perception simply as an event in the sense-organs’. Wallace Matson has generalized the point. Of the Greeks in general he says, ‘Mind–body identity was taken for granted.… Indeed, in the whole classical corpus there exists no denial of the view that sensing is a bodily process throughout’. At the opposite extreme, Friedrich (...) Solmsen has said of Aristotle's theory, ‘it is doubtful whether the movement or the actualization occurring when the eye sees or the ear hears has any physical or physiological aspect.’ Similarly, Jonathan Barnes has described Aristotle as leaning hesitantly towards the view that desire and thought are wholly non-physical. But on the emotions and sense-perception, Barnes takes an intermediate position. Aristotle treats these, he says, as including physical and non-physical components. Other writers too have sought a position somewhere in the middle. Thus G. R. T. Ross concedes that we find in Aristotle ‘what looks like the crudest materialism’. It appears that objects produce changes in an organism, ‘and the reception of these changes in the sense organisperception’. But, he maintains, this gives us only half the picture. The complete theory ‘may in a way be designated as a doctrine of psychophysical parallelism’. W. D. Ross also seeks a middle position. He thinks that Aristotle sometimes brings out ‘the distinctively mental, non-corporeal nature of the act [of sensation].… But Aristotle cannot be said to hold successfully to the notion of sensation as a purely mental activity having nothing in common with anything physical. He is still under the influence of earlier materialism’. (shrink)

In this paper, I aim to explain Peter John Olivi’s technical notion of “aspectus.” More specifically, I distinguish different uses of this notion by Olivi, not all of which have been made clear in the secondary literature, in order to help resolve a prima facie tension in the way Olivi puts together his active theory of cognition and his direct account of cognition (or “direct realism”). In brief, the issue is that Olivi builds his active theory of cognition out of (...) the commitment that the body cannot, strictly speaking, act as an efficient cause to produce an act of cognition in the spiritual soul; so, in order to account for soul-body interaction, Olivi will often speak of the soul having a seemingly one-way aspectus or orientation towards the body so that the soul can respond appropriately to changes in the body. However, given Olivi’s commitment to direct realism, the aspectus of cognition should go directly to the external object when, e.g., perceiving a present object. So, I take it Olivi must have some sort of distinction in mind between types of aspectūs in order to avoid contrariety. In short, my view is that by distinguishing between conscious/cognitive and non conscious/non-cognitive sorts of aspectūs in Olivi, one can understand how an aspectus towards inner corporeal changes can still contribute to direct cognition of external objects. Moreover, I take it that Olivi’s discussion of another technical notion, the mode of connection or “colligantia” between soul and body, provides further evidence for my interpretation. (shrink)

Resumen: Este escrito es un ensayo que busca tensionar el lugar de las imágenes en la experiencia religiosa, proponiendo que toda mirada religiosa es una mirada háptica, por tanto, una visualidad impura que involucra la corporalidad, el tacto y la cercanía de modo des-jerarquizado. La propuesta de este ensayo se basa en las metodologías visuales críticas, y se despliega a partir de una constelación de imágenes que muestran diversos lugares del cuerpo en un sentido religioso, comprometiendo algunos de sus elementos, (...) tales como el alma, la boca y el corazón. Se examinan imágenes en su relación con otras imágenes, objetos y oraciones, organizadas en series temáticas en función de su foco corporal. Las imágenes revisadas comienzan con una serie de la muerte de Santa Rosa de Lima, se concentran luego en la herida corporal en algunas iconografías de santos relativos al sagrado corazón de Jesús y termina en un conjunto de imágenes donde los corazones se independizan del cuerpo.: This essay aims to add further tension to the role of images in relation to religious experience, affirming that every sacred gaze is a haptic gaze, which is to say, a particular way of engaging with images through corporeality, proximity and touching in a non hierarchical way. The proposals exposed here are based on critical visual methodologies and it unfolds from a constellation of images emphasizing certain body parts in a religious sense, highlighting some of their elements, such as the soul, the mouth and the heart. These images are put in relation to other images, objects and prayers, and are organised in thematic series following their function on the corporal focus. The selected images comprise a series of Santa Rosa de Lima’s deathbed, then the attention goes to the exposed wounds of some saints devoted to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and it ends in a group of iconographies where hearts are depicted independently of the body. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:AsphyxiationsSteven Connor (bio)Recent events and sociorhetorical expatiations upon them have reaffirmed breathing as the ideal form of free and unimpeded life, that struggles against the throttlings of oppression. The root meaning of oppression, from the past participle of Latin opprimere, is to press, crush or bear down upon, and the word oppression has commonly been used to signify the feeling of the difficulty of breathing, through some constriction or (...) pressure, as in the nocturnal attentions of the nightmare, the spirit imagined as settling suffocatingly on the chest of the sleeper. As a mare that rides rather than being ridden, the spirit is often imagined as a female succubus, though in Fuseli's 1781 painting the mare is accompanied by a simian incubus who squats on the chest of a female sleeper, prompting these lines from Erasmus Darwin:So on his Nightmare through the evening fogFlits the squab Fiend o'er fen, and lake, and bog;Seeks some love-wilder'd maid with sleep oppress'd,Alights, and grinning sits upon her breast.(Darwin 2.16)'Pressing' meant the forcing of somebody into some condition or service, typically the army or navy. In oppressive weather, the clouds may seem to 'lower', or the humid air to cramp and confine the body.We think of breathing as opening or release, of a piece with open windows and unbounded spaces. Human beings have brewed up fantasies for centuries of more complete modes of breathing that would overcome the constriction represented by the respiratory apparatus, exhorting themselves and each other to breathe more deeply, suffusing, not just the lungs, but the diaphragm, the head, and other items of phantasmal physiology. Indeed, the factitiously hollow spaces of the body–the head that we seek to keep 'clear'–are the proof of the belief in the strange principle of vital vacuity, the idea that we exist most fully in empty spaces of innerness, bodily enclosures evacuated of body. Without this sense of the animating function of the breath, the body suffers the inanition of a "want of living [End Page 74] breath in its lungs, which are full of gases but empty of spirit" (Wilkinson 78). In being taken in and given out, breath seems to commute between what Wittgenstein calls "two kinds of worlds, worlds built of different materials." The fact that "the mental world in fact is liable to be imagined as gaseous, or rather, aethereal," seems to Wittgenstein to be related to "the queer role which the gaseous and the aethereal play in philosophy,–when we perceive that a substantive is not used as what in general we should call the name of an object, and when therefore we can't help saying to ourselves that it is the name of an aethereal object" (Wittgenstein 47). The conception of the soul as an afflatus, or a special kind of magic gas, which has been common among so many different peoples, suggests just this kind of aethereal object-that-is-not-one. It embodies the conviction that we are most essentially present as ourselves where we are closest to being nothing, in an out-of-body kind of body.We breathe out–phew, originally in the seventeenth century a violent expression of disgust or emancipatory emptying, as we might nowadays plosively and purifyingly say poo–when we 'ex-press', as we say, our sense of being, as we also say, 'relieved,' from re + levare, to lift up, implying a lightening, or levitation, that approaches in imagination the condition of air itself. To ventilate is to levitate. To be relieved is to dream of remission from the clinging pressure of your own embodiment, as though you could simply emit or expel your own weight. To inhale is to prepare for stress and struggle: to exhale is to relax, to sigh into satisfaction, converting becoming momentarily to being. Exhalation is therefore the decorporizing of the body, or the corporealization of the incorporeal. But though human beings exalt imaginary emptying, as the purifying expulsion of what is evil, infective, invasive, persecutory, expiration is also death. Speech is the expressive sound formed from the impressing of exhaled breath, the dissolving openness of air given imaginary... (shrink)

How an abstract immaterial being is connected to a physical thing has been viewed variously by western philosophers who considered the issue prior to their Muslim counterparts.Muslim theologians and philosophers, however, developed the related discussions which became heated following the translation of logical books and essays throughout the Translation Era.The focus of this article, besides clarifying the ideas raised by Muslim philosophers in this regard,is to shed light on Mulla Sadra's opinion and its influence on the later philosophers, Abd-ul-Razzaq Lahiji (...) in particular.To explain his opinion,Mulla Sadra primarily brings a proof to establish the unity of the soul,and to prove this,he has refuted the reasons used by the opposing philosophers through negation and affirmation.Using negation,he comments on why there can't be a unity of soul, and then refers to his opponent's inability to distinguish between specific unity and generic unity considering the latter equal to vegetable,animal and human spirits.Soul and body,Mulla Sadra reiterates,are attached to each other in two ways; in one way,soul is attached to body and yet it is contingent on itself and not on the person's being; in the other way,soul is attached to body while the person's potentialities are actualized; this second type of attachment relates to obtaining existential virtues.It must be noted that Mulla Sadra's belief in these two types of attachment results from his belief in the trans-substantial motion in which soul is also involved.Mulla Sadra works out a solution to the question of relation between soul and body and their effects on one another by proposing the mediation of a veiled spirit, since the soul which belongs to a world of pure light does not involve itself directly in the affairs of the dark body. The veiled spirit is as subtle as the non-material soul and as corporeal as it needs in connectionwith body.This view has been argued by Allameh Tabatabii who thinks corporeal qualities and ontological status must be kept separated and not be mixed.Lahiji,on the other hand, seems to have accepted Mulla Sadra's idea looking at it as a philosophical question,not a medical case. He,like Mulla Sadra, while considering unity for soul, thinks of it as having properties such as sensation imagination estimation intellection. According to Lahiji,the unity of soul and body is like the unity of matter and form; however,unlike natural forms,it does not subsist in matter and interestingly,this notion resembles Neo-Platonist views. (shrink)

This book examines the nexus between the corporeal, emotional, spiritual and intellectual aspects of human life as represented in the writing of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Authors from different fields examine not only the question of the body and soul (or body and mind) but also how this question fits into a broader framework in the medieval and early modern period. Concepts such as gender and society, morality, sexuality, theological precepts and medical knowledge are a part of this (...) broader framework. This discussion of ideas draws from over two thousand years of Western thought: from Plato in the fifth century BC and the fourth century Byzantine dialogues on the soul, to the philosophical and medical writings of the early 1700s. There are four sections to this book: each section is based on where the authors have found a conjunction between the body and mind/soul. The work begins with a section on text and self-perception, which focuses on creative output from the period. The second conjunction is human emotions which are described in their social contexts. The third is sex, where the human body and mind are traditionally believed to meet. The fourth section, Material Souls, engages with bodies and other material aspects of existence perceived, studied or utilised as material signs of emotional and spiritual activity. (shrink)

Increasingly the body is a possession that does not belong to us. It is bought and sold, bartered and stolen, marketed wholesale or in parts. The professions - especially reproductive medicine, transplant surgery, and bioethics but also journalism and other cultural specialists - have been pliant partners in this accelerating commodification of live and dead human organisms. Under the guise of healing or research, they have contributed to a new 'ethic of parts' for which the divisible body is severed from (...) the self, torn from the social fabric, and thrust into commercial transactions -- as organs, secretions, reproductive capacities, and tissues -- responding to the dictates of an incipiently global marketplace. Breaking with established approaches which prioritize the body as 'text', the chapters in this book examine not only images of the body-turned-merchandise but actually existing organisms considered at once as material entities, semi-magical tokens, symbolic vectors and founts of lived experience. The topics covered range from the cultural disposal and media treatment of corpses, the biopolitics of cells, sperm banks and eugenics, to the international trafficking of kidneys, the development of 'transplant tourism', to the idioms of corporeal exploitation among prizefighters as a limiting case of fleshly commodity. This insightful and arresting volume combines perspectives from anthropology, law, medicine, and sociology to offer compelling analyses of the concrete ways in which the body is made into a commodity and how its marketization in turn remakes social relations and cultural meanings. (shrink)

A alma é, sem dúvida, um dos problemas que mais interessou a Santo Agostinho; ele a define como uma substância partícipe da razão adequada ao governo de um corpo. A alma não tem quantidade corporal, contudo, é uma coisa grande. Este estudo pretende refletir sobre os sete graus de atividade da alma, os quais o autor apresenta na sua obra De quantitate animae. São eles: a animação, a sensação, a arte, a virtude, a tranquilidade, o ingresso e a contemplação. The (...) soul is undoubtedly one of the problems that most interested St. Augustine. He defines it as a substance participating of reason, adequate for the government of a body. The soul has no corporal quantity, but is nevertheless a great thing. This study aims to reflect on the seven degrees of activity of the soul, which the author presents in his work De quantitate animae. The are: animation, sensation, art, virtue, tranquility, ingress and contemplation. (shrink)

Light as divine source of truth and excellence is a pervasive metaphor in St. Augustine. This paper examines the distinction between two lights and two eyes: corporeal and incorporeal light, which correspond to the bodily eye and the eye of the soul, respectively. The paper also puts forward a political reading of this light-optic tension.

Contemporary scholarship accents incipient theurgical practice for Plotinus; this lends a certain urgency to the question of his acceptance of magic. While use of magic recorded in Porphyry's Vita Plotini has received considerable attention, far less has been done to analyze actual discussion in the Enneads. Examination of key passages brings to light the context for discussion of magic, particularly issues of sympathy, prayer, astrology and divination. Equally important is Plotinus' understanding of the cosmos and role of the heavenly bodies. (...) Plotinus' affirmation of the highest part of the soul as undescended, together with the claim that our soul has a common origin with the World Soul in Soul-Hypostasis, is significant for the relative unimportance he attributes to the role and effect of magic. (shrink)

Melissus’ fragment B9, where he claims that being has no body and no thickness, raises the question of how being can be extended and full and at the same time incorporeal. Most recent interpretations tried to avoid lending to “body” the meaning of “physical body”. My aim in this paper is to reconstruct Melissus’ notion of body, by examining its connection to “thickness”. I show that Melissus meant by “thick” something that has distinct parts and therefore supports in B9 the (...) indivisibility of being. I then indicate that he relied on the contrast between soul and body for his conception of corporeality, by highlighting that by Presocratic thinkers, the soul was considered as “thin” and regarded as something that could be exempt of the division into parts. I conclude that even though Melissus’ notion of incorporeality is very different from the one Plato will develop, he made a huge step toward its conceptualization. (shrink)

This paper presents and discusses Samuel Colliberʼs theory of the soul in its philosophical and theological setting. His reflections on the soul have not been studied methodically, but, as I hope to show, they deserve more attention for at least two reasons. First, Colliber appropriates a set of terms, concepts and views from Lockeʼs Essay, but he modifies them for the sake of his own scheme in historically interesting ways. He provides a closed list of cognitive acts or operations, claiming (...) that they are all modes of sensation or perception proceeding from a single unitary faculty. He contends that some of these operations depend on the body while others, most notably internal sensation, do not. Second, Colliber applies this account to the post-mortal states of the soul in a systematic manner. He argues for the distinction and separability of soul and body and gives a fairly detailed description of the capabilities and operations of the soul in its separate state. At the same time, he distances himself from the Cartesian view that the soul is an immaterial substance whose essence excludes everything corporeal. He holds that the natures of soul and body are different but not completely disparate. (shrink)

The use of metaphors and analogies was widespread in English political literature during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and for contemporary readers they were more than merely rhetorical artifices – they were used to illustrate and, in some cases, even to provide evidence. In this regard, none was more apt than the most prominent of these analogies: that between the human body and the state. The political thought of the time established an unshakeable connection between the two, building an (...) argument for how their structures and ways of functioning mirrored each other. This paper examines one of the most extensive and thorough examples of corporal analogies in early modern English political literature – that of Edward Forset’s A Comparative Discourse of the Bodies Natural and Politique (1606) – and shows how such corporal analogies were used to construct an absolutist political model wherein the king was depicted as the soul, the head and the heart of the body politic. The paper integrates Forset’s A Comparative Discourse within the context of the ideological struggles from the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth, while its place within the larger picture of the medieval and early modern metaphor of the body politic is also examined, in order to assess the lineage and originality of Forset’s ideas and point out how the same kind of analogies could be used to provide significantly different political interpretations. (shrink)

This paper describes the concept of corporeality in the context of science art and the role of technology in contemporary culture. Human corporeality is a body endowed with soul and meaning. It results from personal and social experience, historical development, or cultural context and its implicit impacts. The subject of this research is corporeal code that organize the nature of modern artistic productions and human being identity. Contemporary artists use the strategies of participation and interaction, forms of interventions (...) to make art an agent of social change and to become active drivers for the new identity process activation. Problems of identity make up a significant layer in contemporary art. The identification process develops in them in various directions. We can characterize its evolution as a change of identities. Recognizing the role and intense impact of technology on contemporary culture, we can trace two main directions: one involves extension of human senses and abilities by creating new solutions, software and tools, that let us get advanced understanding of the reality, and the second one is based on presupposed physical capacities of the human corporeality. According this approach the understanding of reality as a reality given in sensations is disappearing. The virtual world comes to replace it, our essence becomes involved in the process of mixing and indistinguishability until its complete disappearance. (shrink)

In his De Natura et Origine Animae, an answer to a work by Vincentius Victor, Augustine was drawn into attempting to answer some questions about what kind of reality dream-bodies, dream-worlds and dream-pains have. In this paper I concentrate on Augustine's attempts to show that none of Victor's arguments for the corporeality of the soul are any good, and that Victor's inflated claims about the extent of the soul's self-knowledge are the result of mistaking self-awareness for self-knowledge. Augustine takes (...) the position that the feelings we have in dreams and the feelings of the dead, although they are real feelings, are not always the feelings they seem to be. This position is consistent with Augustine's later works, though it departs from his understanding of these issues in his earliest works. (shrink)

_Theurgy and the Soul_ is a study of Iamblichus of Syria, whose teachings set the final form of pagan spirituality prior to the Christianization of the Roman Empire. Gregory Shaw focuses on the theory and practice of theurgy, the most controversial and significant aspect of Iamblichus's Platonism. Theurgy literally means "divine action." Unlike previous Platonists who stressed the elevated status of the human soul, Iamblichus taught that the soul descended completely into the body and thereby required the performance of theurgic (...) rites—revealed by the gods—to unite the soul with the One. Iamblichus was once considered one of the great philosophers whose views on the soul and the importance of ritual profoundly influenced subsequent Platonists such as Proclus and Damascius. The Emperor Julian followed Iamblichus's teachings to guide the restoration of traditional pagan cults in his campaign against Christianity. Although Julian was unsuccessful, Iamblichus's ideas persisted well into the Middle Ages and beyond. His vision of a hierarchical cosmos united by divine ritual became the dominant world view for the entire medieval world and played an important role in the Renaissance Platonism of Marsilio Ficino. Even Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that he expected a reading of Iamblichus to cause a "revival in the churches." But modern scholars have dismissed him, seeing theurgy as ritual magic or "manipulation of the gods." Shaw, however, shows that theurgy was a subtle and intellectually sophisticated attempt to apply Platonic and Pythagorean teachings to the full expression of human existence in the material world. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Methods of punishing corporations have changed from self-regulation to economic sanctions by government as corporations have evolved from small groups of entrepreneurs to multinational entities. It is proposed that the next stage in the evolution of punishment methods is modified vendettas, or organized attempts by non-government groups to influence corporations through the application of economic and non-economic sanctions.This paper develops the concept of modified vendettas as a complement to government-initiated economic sanctions. The effectiveness of modified vendettas is analyzed through two (...) case examples. As with any punishment method, however, the usefulness of a modified vendetta depends not only on its effectiveness but also on how well it meets society's needs to monitor and check corporate activity while preserving corporations' rights to operate. To resolve this issue, modified vendettas are assessed using a philosophical framework incorporating both retributive and utilitarian principles. It is found that modified vendettas extend society's ability to control corporate behavior while corporations have legal and public relations means to protect themselves from frivolous use of the technique. Did you ever expect a corporation to have a conscience, when it has no soul to be damned, and no body to be kicked? (Baron Thurlow). (shrink)

As in religious traditions, the soul organizes entirely the human condition horizon; postmodern culture sets the body as the organizing centre of its sacralizing mechanisms. Some even speak about a cult and about ritual mechanisms having a religious charge. On the one hand, the body is attributed a symbolic dimension surfacing in the fight against the finite and life’s lack of meaning. On the other, turning the body into a centre of the existential universe triggers a better delineation of the (...) functions it may fulfill. An important role belongs to the networking function that crosses over the human inhabited worlds, from the physical one to the spiritual and religious one. To highlight these aspects, I called on the reflections in Aurel Codoban’s communication philosophy. The new view on corporality brings the image of body as language, as communication instrument and as significant surface. Against this background, the body sets a self-concern whose consequence, symbolically, is a dialectic movement of body and soul nourishing one other and improving one another in light of authenticity. (shrink)

In the present book, Pauline Phemister argues against traditional Anglo-American interpretations of Leibniz as an idealist who conceives ultimate reality as a plurality of mind-like immaterial beings and for whom physical bodies are ultimately unreal and our perceptions of them illusory. Re-reading the texts without the prior assumption of idealism allows the more material aspects of Leibniz's metaphysics to emerge. Leibniz is found to advance a synthesis of idealism and materialism. His ontology posits indivisible, living, animal-like corporeal substances as the (...) real metaphysical constituents of the universe; his epistemology combines sense-experience and reason; and his ethics fuses confused perceptions and insensible appetites with distinct perceptions and rational choice. In the light of his sustained commitment to the reality of bodies, Phemister re-examines his dynamics, the doctrine of pre-established harmony and his views on freedom. The image of Leibniz as a rationalist philosopher who values activity and reason over passivity and sense-experience is replaced by the one of a philosopher who recognises that, in the created world, there can only be activity if there is also passivity; minds, souls and forms if there is also matter; good if there is evil; perfection if there is imperfection. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

The body is at the heart of critical and phenomenological concerns, yet it is the soul that is increasingly under pressure. As we are being stripped of our structures of commonality, we need a renewed concept of political spirituality. My aim is to enrich Simondon’s concept of spirituality as transindividuality through Souriau’s transmodal architectonics. My argument proceeds in two steps: (i) I emphasize the precarious and communal modality of «having a soul», defining it as a possession without ownership and demonstrating (...) its inseparability from the problems of intensive variation and discontinuity. (ii) I then argue that Souriau is inspired by Leibniz’s disjunction between the ontic soul and the relational body, which holds the key to an account of spiritual commitment that exceeds the union of corporeal and psychical existences insofar as it invents a new common use for them. (shrink)

The main aim of this study is to explain passage 35b4-37a2 of Plato’s Timaeus which deals with three main topics: the mathematization of the world’s soul, its movement, and its binding to the world’s body. First, it is argued that the mathematical structure of the world-soul allows it to participate in and be sensitive to harmony, which is essential for the correct workings of its cognitive capacities. Second, the division of the world-soul to the circle of the same and the (...) circles of the different and its self-motion comes in. This allows it to ‘touch’ and cognize the forms and the material things, as well as rule the movement of the corporeal world and care for it. In this aspect, the world-soul continues the process that started with the original creative act of the demiurge. Third, it is argued that the description of the world-soul’s binding to the world-body entails its conception as a spatially extended entity, which, in turn, explains of the possibility of an interaction between the corporeal world and its soul. (shrink)

The paper examines the account of the mortal parts of the human soul in theTimaeus. What is their nature? What is their relationship to the immortal part of the soul and its inner structure on the one hand, and to the body and its organs and their functioning on the other? Are they incorporeal or corporeal? What kind of movement do they have? In what sense precisely are they ‘another kind of soul’ ?

The aim of this article is to examine some of the anatomical implications of Campanella's theory of magic, focusing in particular on his crìtique of Aristotle's and Galen's anatomical views. By magic Campanella meant first and foremost communication of energy and knowledge. It is no accident that he viewed both medicine and rhetoric as constitutive disciplines of magic. In doing so, he appealed to the time-honoured notion of the magic of the word theorised in ancient times by the sophist Gorgias. (...) The distinctive feature in Campanella's system of magic is that the word is both a symbolic and a physical entity. Meaning flows from nature to the mind and from the mind to nature. Words are both carriers of meanings and physical agents of psychosomatic transformation. As can be demonstrated by pointing to such paradigmatic cases as natural divination and prophecy, the force of the imagination, the patient's trust in the power of the physician or the healer, and the many influences that air exercises on the body, Campanella's theory of magic rests on a definite anatomo-physiological basis. The most original aspect, though, is the way in which Campanella reinterpreted Arìstotle's and Galen's prìnciples of anatomy so that he could adapt his medical views to the broader framework of his theory of magic (practice), on the one hand, and metaphysics (theory), on the other. In addition, Campanella's onginal account of emotions and passions supported a comprehensive system of magical practice that dispensed with the basic principles of both Aristotle's and Galen's physiology. Campanella was convinced that the vital operations of the body could not be explained by simply relying on the unsentient functions of the vegetative soul (Aristotle) or on the natural faculties of the body (Galen), nor could they be accounted for by assuming the existence of incorporeal souls (Aristotle) or bodily temperaments (Galen). By circumventing both Aristotle's hylomorphism and Galen's vital matenalism of the temperaments, and by appropriating the Stoic view of rational pneuma, he managed to produce a physiological model that was more flexible in dealing with the complex interplay of knowledge, action and appetite, and above all, better suited to account for a universe in which the flow of life and meaning encompassed varìous levels of communication. (shrink)

Does self-knowledge help? A rationalist, presumably, thinks that it does: both that self-knowledge is possible and that, if gained through appropriate channels, it is desirable. Descartes notoriously claimed that, with appropriate methods of enquiry, each of his readers could become an expert on herself or himself. In this paper I reject the widespread interpretation of Descartes which makes his dualist view of the body as negative or as pathological as that expressed by Socrates in Plato's *Phaedo*. I argue not just (...) that the old moral cosmobiological disgust at the body is absent in Descartes, but that, positively, Descartes *requires* us to contract full intimacy with our own body and our own peculiar past. He does wish for objective knowledge in these difficult domains, but this does not render his neurological ethics a universal prescription, for such objective knowledge is nevertheless knowledge of local phenomena, of the peculiarities of idiosyncratic associations. Civilsing the body, in seeking dominion over it, is a *process*; and, I will argue, Descartes was too firmly convinced that the body constantly changes its nature to have thought consistently that the process could come to an end. My case rests first on an analysis, in the next three sections, of capacities which, according to Descartes, we share with other animals. Sections 2 and 3 argue for strongly dynamic interpretations of Descartes' views on body and on corporeal memory respectively. Then Section 4 backtracks to support more firmly the surprisingly complex form of 'automatic' responses which I attribute to Descartes' beast- and body-machines. Finally, in section 5, I reintroduce the soul and the capacities for reflection which it allows in the human compound, showing how closely Descartes thinks we must work with the body, its habits and its history, in deliberately moulding our associative responses with active mind. (shrink)

In the not-too-distant future, robots will populate the walks of everyday life, from the manufacturing floor to corporate offices, and from battlefields to the home. While most work on the social implications of robotics focuses on such moral issues as the economic impact on human workers or the ethics of lethal machines, scant attention is paid to the effect of the advent of the robotic age on religion. Robots will likely become commonplace in the home by the end of the (...) twenty-first century as nannies and caretakers, particularly for young children. As a consequence, parents will want to be assured that robots will instruct their children in their values, based upon the moral teachings of their religious tradition. Consequently, parents will need robots programmed with appropriate religious software, installed by corporations but approved by their religious communities, e.g., Catholic robots, Muslim robots, and Lutheran robots. If, as expected, robots will acquire the capacity to engage in independent reasoning, believers will want to incorporate their robots within their religious communities to influence the evolution of robotic religious views. The Robotic Age will therefore present basic theological challenges. If robots simulate human personalities, desires, and fears, can religious communities tailor their doctrine, rituals, and institutions to accommodate these new “converts”? In short, can religion generate “soulless” theologies for the non-human? The Robotic Age promises a challenge unlike any other in the history of religious traditions. Biofundamentalists will undoubtedly resist revolutionary changes in theology, but for many people of faith, it will be difficult to resist appealing to those who appear and act strikingly like human beings. This paper poses questions and entertains speculation about those theological challenges, particularly in Christianity, which believers will face, e.g., concepts of the soul, blood sacrifice and redemption, marriage, and death. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this article, the issue of corporeal reality in Evagrius is discussed in abstraction – to the extent that this is possible – from its soteriological purpose. An analysis of Evagrius’ statements about corporeal reality reveals a world that cannot be known in itself, but which is established through a hierarchy of qualifications. Evagrius’ account of the elements and their features, of the relationship of qualities to matter, and of the process in which the intellect apprehends bodies, appears to (...) be deeply indebted to the Stoic account of bodily reality. Evagrius differs, however, in that the corporeal reality he describes is inherently unknowable and lifeless. As he develops Stoic intuitions about the commanding faculty into a vision of an intellect holding within itself a model of its bearer’s body, and as he moves the logoi of judgement and providence outside of corporeal reality, the latter turns into a desert from which life and rationality are absent. An intellect, as a soul, is only liminally present in corporeal reality. Focused on itself, it becomes a subjectivity that only interacts with the external bodily world through a model of the latter that it constructs within the boundaries of the soul itself. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

One of the most important problems in philosophy especially after Mulla Sadra is Philosophical explanation of corporeal resurrection. Aqa Ali Modarres as a post Sadraian philosopher has a new theory which is based on some philosophical principles among them we can mention these: Soul by departure from body leaves some features in body components which are in harmony with its existence. These features create a substantial motion in body components and put them in an existential evolution. Finally a new body (...) which is made up through this existential evolution connects to the soul again in hereafter. The substantial motion of body is in a way that every body solely matches its own soul which had in its previous life. So, on the basis of Modarres' theory it will be possible to have a new perspective on life after death which is more compatible with Quran and Sunna and is away from the difficulties of Dashtaki's theory. (shrink)

The relation between violence and corporality is no more or less than teleological, a relation that had a huge impact upon an older one, between mind and body, or soul and body. This teleology of violence was made possible by the political investiture of the body. The extermination camp becomes the symbol and the symptom where the relations between mind and body were broke. Torture, as a limit experience, brings us in front of a revolt of the soul against the (...) body, a revolt that prolongs into the social life. In this way de-corporality becomes a simple mechanism of defense, which affects, perhaps forever, the feature of this fragile alliance between mind and body, while the principle that starts to govern the soul becomes: there is no sufferings where is no body. (shrink)

From US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis’s 1933 judgement in Louis K Liggett Co v Lee to Matt Wuerker’s satirical cartoon “Corpenstein”, the use of Frankenstein’s monster as a metaphor for the modern corporation has been a common practice. This paper seeks to unpack and extend explicitly this metaphorical register via a recent filmic and graphic interpretation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein myth. Whilst Frankenstein has been read as an allegorical critique of rights—Victor Frankenstein’s creation of a monstrous body, reflecting the (...) figurative construction of a body by rights discourse—the metaphoric notion of reanimating a ‘soulless corpse’ resonates with Edward’s Thurlow’s description of the corporation as having ‘no soul to damn’. By exploring the figurative and optical representations of this process of reanimating the body in Scott Beattie’s film I, Frankenstein and Kevin Grevioux’s companion graphic novel I, Frankenstein: Genesis, I would like to extend this metaphoric register, by examining the theological origin and nature of the corporate form. This theology is explicitly referenced in the film and graphic novel via the battle between Gargoyles and Demons, which dominates the plot and backstory. The role of Frankenstein’s monster—now called Adam—however, is about enabling the reanimation of thousands of corpses without souls for possession by the demon hoard headed by Prince Naberius, who in his alternative persona Charles Wessex, controls the Wessex Institute and Wessex Industries. This ‘corporate baron’ himself has devoted his ‘life’ to enabling the rediscovery of Frankenstein’s ability to reanimate the dead for the purposes of gaining immortality. This mythic framing, however, renders explicitly visible the nature and purpose of the corporate form itself—of capturing and reanimating life in a form of immortality via the mechanisms of perpetual succession. This visual rendering, of a metaphoric framing goes to show the way in which the optical nature of the dominant forms of popular culture—film, television, comic books—provide a means for seeing law’s metaphorical images and for thus unpacking, interrogating and rendering them anew. It argues for a shift from the image of the corporation as a monstrous body to one which involves relations of reciprocity, gratuitousness and gift. (shrink)

At the beginning of his book Body, Community, Language, World, Jan Patočka claims that the human body has never been considered worthy of reflection throughout the entire (Western) philosophical tradition. Human corporeity has been largely excluded from philosophical reflections since the times of Plato’s conception of the human as a being divided between a mortal body and an immortal soul. Yet there is one thinker who had, as early as the nineteenth century, described the history of philosophy, from Plato to (...) Hegel, as a history of the loss of human corporeity. This philosopher was Ludwig Feuerbach. While Patočka follows the path of phenomenological anthropology, Feuerbach tries to return the sense of corporeity to the human being through the rehabilitation of sensuous perceptions and emotions. Despite their different approaches to the problem, Patočka and Feuerbach both agree with the notion that intersubjectivity, based on the corporeity of two autonomous subjects, stands outside of any cognitive pattern. They both persist in their efforts to bring the human body back into philosophy as a relevant source of experience because they both understand that the human body remains a universal symbol across all cultures and societies. (shrink)

In this chapter, I draw on French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of perception and corporeal sensibility to consider the significance of human situatedness as expressed via place and place experience. To illustrate how Merleau-Ponty’s conceptual understanding might be applied to real-world place experiences, I draw on two sources of experiential evidence, the first of which is a passage from Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez’s magical-realist novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude. The second source is a set of first-person observations describing (...) events and situations that I happened to take note of during weekday walks between my home and university office over the course of several months. My aim is to use these two narrative accounts as a means to illustrate, via vignettes of everyday human experience, Merleau-Ponty’s central concepts of perception, body-subject, and lived embodiment. I contend that these accounts substantiate Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological claims and point to additional significant elements of human situatedness and place experience. (shrink)

In this paper I re-examine the status of the mind-body relation in several of Plato’s late dialogues. A range of views has been attributed to Plato here. For example, it has been thought that Plato is a substance dualist, for whom the mind can exist independently of the body; or an attribute dualist, who has left behind the strong dualistic commitments of the Phaedo by allowing that the mind may be the subject of spatial movements. But even in cases where (...) a classification of Plato as a holder of a particular ontology of the mind has been left undefined, it has been a shared assumption that in the late dialogues the mind itself must be immaterial. I take issue with these various views and show that none of them is necessitated by the text. In the first place, I argue there is strong evidence against the view that Plato should, in his late period, be committed not only to substance dualism, but also to attribute dualism. Furthermore, it is possible that Plato may have allowed that the mind itself be a three-dimensional corporeal entity (in a way that sets up a precedent for later Stoic developments). But even if this is not the only possible reading of the text, it is shown how at any rate the mind must be seen in late Plato as the principle of organization of a body and ontologically inseparable from it. Despite prima facie affinities with Aristotle here, we shall see a Plato emerge for whom the mind (without exception) and the body cannot exist without one another – a thesis more radical than that of Aristotle’s. To bring out the provocative nature of this suggestion, I start, in section I, by laying out the state of the question and compare what I shall argue is the late Platonic view with standard interpretations of his previous work, stressing the historical force that I expect this thesis to have. Afterwards, in three respective sections, I proceed to pay heed to relevant passages in the Timaeus, Philebus and Laws in order to establish the main point of this paper. Finally, in section V, I consider the challenge apparently introduced against my thesis by Plato’s occasional talk of immortality and eschatology in those dialogues, and argue instead that many of those passages add further strength to the view defended in this essay. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Descartes held that the human mind or soul is indivisible, unlike body. In this paper I argue that his treatment of this feature of the soul is intimately connected to his engagement with Aristotelian scholasticism. I discuss two strands in Descartes. There is a long tradition of arguing for the immortality of the human soul on the basis of this view. Descartes did use this view in defense of dualism, but I argue that he held that the soul’s immortality should (...) be established rather on the basis of its status as a substance. This line of thought, I contend, is connected to his rejection of (most) Aristotelian substantial forms. Furthermore, the indivisibility of the human soul emerges repeatedly in connection to the union and interaction of mind and body in ways that connect to Aristotelian scholastic treatments of these issues. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Bonaventure, the Body, and the Aesthetics of Salvation by Rachel DaviesRobin LandrithRachel Davies, Bonaventure, the Body, and the Aesthetics of Salvation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. Xii + 187. $105.00. ISBN: 9781108485371. Rachel Davies's Bonaventure, the Body, and the Aesthetics of Salvation finds in Bonaventure a resource for contemporary theological efforts to read embodied experience as a primary text. She argues that Bonaventure supports these efforts (...) by affirming the body as an aid to the soul in the whole self's sanctification. In her effort to read Bonaventure's account of the body in aesthetic terms, Davies argues that Bonaventure sees the suffering body as the site of the revelation of God's beauty. Distinguishing her reading from that of Hans Urs von Balthasar, however, Davies avoids suggesting that bodily suffering is beautiful per se (19–21), emphasizing instead the need to seek the beauty unique to bodily suffering "through" that suffering, looking toward its redemption (25). The beauty of suffering is beauty in potency—beautiful only insofar as it is grafted onto Christ's suffering, and, like Christ's suffering, only revealed as beautiful when it appears in the resurrected body. For Davies, the "deep logic" (32) by which Christ's suffering and resurrection transform human suffering permits hope that suffering can be made meaningful, but that same logic also refuses premature attempts to say how it will be made meaningful. Davies's argument is most persuasive when read as a mystical meditation on the beauty unique to human suffering—that is, as a theo-logical text in the formal sense. There is a pastoral sensitivity motivating her scholarly contribution. The book attempts to address "a common human struggle: the experience of bodily diminishment, which threatens to turn corporeality into a noetic obstacle rather than the communicative medium it was intended to be" (170). In some ways, Davies shows Bonaventure to be a useful resource in pursuit of this aim. At the same time, Bonaventure's works and milieu create conditions within which Davies's scholarly and pastoral theses occasionally work against each other. Davies first intends to highlight Bonaventure's (occasionally) favorable view [End Page 245] of the body—a view which stands apart from less-favorable assessments frequent in medieval theology (32). In doing so, Davies recovers an important, surprisingly tender, instance of medieval sensitivity to the soul's abandonment of the body in sin alongside medieval references to the body's rebellion against the soul. As a scholarly contribution, Davies's work draws attention to these existing, if at times undeveloped, intuitions within Bonaventure's account of the role of the body in the process of sanctification. Still, it is difficult to see an obvious pastoral application for the claim that the soul abandons the body when we consider cases of involuntary chronic or terminal suffering. Davies does not try to offer one, but neither does she address the fact that shifting the accent to the guilt of the soul in abandoning the body risks shifting the blame for suffering—even chronic suffering—to the sufferer herself. Davies by no means thinks the blame lies here. She is attentive to the challenges that such suffering presents to the sufferer. Indeed, it is to alleviate some of these challenges that Davies emphasizes the mystical, rather than imitative, aspect of Bonaventure's account of the effect of Christ's suffering on other instances of human suffering (109). She observes that Christ's "victory is a victory for the entire Church," which means that "those who cannot begin to imagine the transfiguration of their own sufferings, or direct their feelings toward any sort of fruitfulness, can at least consent to be carried along passively in Christ's return to the Father" (108). This "requires nothing but blind trust, and does not ask people to find meaning in their own suffering, or even to be at peace with it" (108). I am convinced by the pastoral merit of this point, and of the capacity of Bonaventure's mystical soteriology to sustain it. But the notion of an unconscious or unintentional transfiguration of suffering raises two further questions regarding attempts to apply Davies's... (shrink)

In this paper I examine G. R. Carone's interpretation of the mind-body problem in late Plato, published in a recent issue of this review. Against Carone's attempt to attribute Plato with a reductionist thesis, whereby the soul can be reduced to the body, I argue that a careful reading of the Timaeus confirms that Plato held a dualist thesis, the soul consisting of an incorporeal substance which cannot be reduced to the corporeal substance the body consists of.

In the present article, I intend to examine the importance of Engel’s mimicry for the corporeal visualization of affects, showing the links with its roots in the early German Enlightenment. If the body serves as a picture of the soul, the aim of this essay is to understand how Engel’s mimicry turns this correspondence to its own purpose, enhancing its role as a privileged observatory of the human mind as well as a building site of a historical form of humanity.