A Brief History of the Soul

A Brief History of the Soul
Author: Stewart Goetz
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 195
Release: 2011-05-18
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1444395920

This book is a clear and concise history of the soul in western philosophy, from Plato to cutting-edge contemporary work in philosophy of mind. Packed with arguments for and against a range of different, historically significant philosophies of the soul Addresses the essential issues, including mind-body interaction, the causal closure of the physical world, and the philosophical implications of the brain sciences for the soul's existence Includes coverage of theories from key figures, such as Plato, Aquinas, Locke, Hume, and Descartes Unique in combining the history of ideas and the development of a powerful case for a non-reductionist, non-materialist account of the soul

The Early Greek Concept of the Soul

The Early Greek Concept of the Soul
Author: Jan Bremmer
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 171
Release: 2020-10-06
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0691219354

Jan Bremmer presents a provocative picture of the historical development of beliefs regarding the soul in ancient Greece. He argues that before Homer the Greeks distinguished between two types of soul, both identified with the individual: the free soul, which possessed no psychological attributes and was active only outside the body, as in dreams, swoons, and the afterlife; and the body soul, which endowed a person with life and consciousness. Gradually this concept of two kinds of souls was replaced by the idea of a single soul. In exploring Greek ideas of human souls as well as those of plants and animals, Bremmer illuminates an important stage in the genesis of the Greek mind.

In Search of the Soul

In Search of the Soul
Author: John Cottingham
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2022-04-12
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0691234035

How our beliefs about the soul have developed through the ages, and why an understanding of it still matters today The concept of the soul has been a recurring area of exploration since ancient times. What do we mean when we talk about finding our soul, how do we know we have one, and does it hold any relevance in today’s scientifically and technologically dominated society? From Socrates and Augustine to Darwin and Freud, In Search of the Soul takes readers on a concise, accessible journey into the origins of the soul in Western philosophy and culture, and examines how the idea has developed throughout history to the present. Touching on literature, music, art, and theology, John Cottingham illustrates how, far from being redundant in contemporary times, the soul attunes us to the importance of meaning and value, and experience and growth. A better understanding of the soul might help all of us better understand what it is to be human. Cottingham delves into the evolution of our thoughts about the soul through landmark works—including those of Aristotle, Plato, and Descartes. He considers the nature of consciousness and subjective experience, and discusses the psychoanalytic view that large parts of the human psyche are hidden from direct conscious awareness. He also reflects on the mysterious and universal longing for transcendence that is an indelible part of our human makeup. Looking at the soul’s many dimensions—historical, moral, psychological, and spiritual—Cottingham makes a case for how it exerts a powerful pull on all of us. In Search of the Soul is a testimony to how the soul remains a profoundly significant aspect of human flourishing.

Aristotle on Earlier Greek Psychology

Aristotle on Earlier Greek Psychology
Author: Jason W. Carter
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2019-03-21
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1108574777

This volume is the first in English to provide a full, systematic investigation into Aristotle's criticisms of earlier Greek theories of the soul from the perspective of his theory of scientific explanation. Some interpreters of the De Anima have seen Aristotle's criticisms of Presocratic, Platonic, and other views about the soul as unfair or dialectical, but Jason W. Carter argues that Aristotle's criticisms are in fact a justified attempt to test the adequacy of earlier theories in terms of the theory of scientific knowledge he advances in the Posterior Analytics. Carter proposes a new interpretation of Aristotle's confrontations with earlier psychology, showing how his reception of other Greek philosophers shaped his own hylomorphic psychology and led him to adopt a novel dualist theory of the soul–body relation. His book will be important for students and scholars of Aristotle, ancient Greek psychology, and the history of the mind–body problem.

On Losing the Soul

On Losing the Soul
Author: Richard K. Fenn
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 264
Release: 1995-01-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780791424933

This book introduces the notion of the soul and explores some of the indications, causes, and consequences for its being missing, especially in discussions of individuality.

The Rise and Fall of the Afterlife

The Rise and Fall of the Afterlife
Author: Jan N. Bremmer
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2003-09-02
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1134768222

Belief in the afterlife is still very much alive in Western civilisation, even though the truth of its existence is no longer universally accepted. Surprisingly, however, heaven, hell and the immortal soul were all ideas which arrived relatively late in the ancient world. Originally Greece and Israel - the cultures that gave us Christianity - had only the vaguest ideas of an afterlife. So where did these concepts come from and why did they develop? In this fascinating, learned, but highly readable book, Jan N. Bremmer - one of the foremost authorities on ancient religion - takes a fresh look at the major developments in the Western imagination of the afterlife, from the ancient Greeks to the modern near-death experience.

The Soul in Everyday Life

The Soul in Everyday Life
Author: Daniel Chapelle
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2003-09-25
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0791486168

The Soul in Everyday Life argues that modern psychology has given up on dealing with the idea of soul (or psyche), even though the field is named after it. If psychology wishes to be truly satisfying, it needs to be more than behavioral science, according to Daniel Chapelle. He concludes that psychology can only satisfy the deepest human needs when it can offer a sense of soul in everyday life. He explores ways of restoring this sense of soul to everyday life by examining how talk about something as elusive as the soul is possible and by reanimating a sense for what the notion of soul can mean. Working in the tradition of Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, and Jung's student James Hillman, Chapelle reaches back into millennia of Western thought to reanimate the dying sense of soul in everyday life and put the "psyche" back in "psychology."

Plato and the Divided Self

Plato and the Divided Self
Author: Rachel Barney
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 409
Release: 2012-02-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 0521899664

Investigates Plato's account of the tripartite soul, looking at how the theory evolved over the Republic, Phaedrus and Timaeus.

What is Soul?

What is Soul?
Author: Wolfgang Giegerich
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 468
Release: 2020-01-06
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1000061361

Rooted in the metaphysics of bygone times, the notion of soul in our Western tradition is packed with associations and meanings that are incompatible with the anthropological and naturalistic thinking that prevails in modernity. Whereas treatises of old conceived of the soul as an infinite, immaterial substance which was the ground of man’s hope for eternal salvation, modern psychology has for the most part discarded the concept in favor of more tangible touchstones such as the emotions, desires, and attachments which characterize man as a finite, bodily-existing positive fact. An exception to this trend has been the analytical psychology of C. G. Jung. Against the positivistic spirit of his times, Jung insisted upon a "‘psychology with soul,’ that is, a psychology based upon the hypothesis of an autonomous mind." In this volume, Wolfgang Giegerich once again takes up the Jungian commitment to a psychology with soul. Agreeing with Jung that the soul concept is indispensable for a truly psychological psychology, he supplements and re-orients the Jungian approach to both this concept and the phenomenology of the soul by means of a whole series of nuanced discussions that are as rigorous as they are thoroughgoing. The result is nothing short of a tour de force. Tarrying with the negative, Giegerich’s particular contribution resides in his showing the movement against the soul to be the soul’s own doing. In animus moments of itself, consciousness in the form of philosophy and Enlightenment reason turned upon itself as religion and metaphysics. Far from abolishing the soul, however, these incisive negations were themselves negated. As if dancing upon its own demise, the soul came home to itself, not as an invisible metaphysical substance, but more invisibly still as the logically negative evaporation of that substance into the form of subject, or even better said, into psychology.

The Powers of Aristotle's Soul

The Powers of Aristotle's Soul
Author: Thomas Kjeller Johansen
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2012-10-18
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0191633011

Aristotle is considered by many to be the founder of 'faculty psychology'—the attempt to explain a variety of psychological phenomena by reference to a few inborn capacities. In The Powers of Aristotle's Soul, Thomas Kjeller Johansen investigates his main work on psychology, the De Anima, from this perspective. He shows how Aristotle conceives of the soul's capacities and how he uses them to account for the souls of living beings. Johansen offers an original account of how Aristotle defines the capacities in relation to their activities and proper objects, and considers the relationship of the body to the definition of the soul's capacities. Against the background of Aristotle's theory of science, Johansen argues that the capacities of the soul serve as causal principles in the explanation of the various life forms. He develops detailed readings of Aristotle's treatment of nutrition, perception, and intellect, which show the soul's various roles as formal, final and efficient causes, and argues that the so-called 'agent' intellect falls outside the scope of Aristotle's natural scientific approach to the soul. Other psychological activities, various kinds of perception (including 'perceiving that we perceive'), memory, imagination, are accounted for in their explanatory dependency on the basic capacities. The ability to move spatially is similarly explained as derivative from the perceptual or intellectual capacities. Johansen claims that these capacities together with the nutritive may be understood as 'parts' of the soul, as they are basic to the definition and explanation of the various kinds of soul. Finally, he considers how the account of the capacities in the De Anima is adopted and adapted in Aristotle's biological and minor psychological works.