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11517 results in Ancient philosophy

Page 154 of 576

  • Chapter 4 - Second Layer

  • D. M. Hutchinson, St Olaf College, Minnesota
  • Book:
    Plotinus on Consciousness
    Published online:
    24 April 2018
    Print publication:
    26 April 2018, pp 67-118

  • Summary

    The second layer of consciousness unifies the lower soul with the logoi present within it, which enables it to dissolve the duality inherent in discursive reasoning between reasoning subject and object reasoned-about. The power responsible for this layer is the imagination. The second layer involves two modes of consciousness, which build on the first layer. The primary type is apprehension (antilêpsis), which is indirect and mediated since the soul becomes conscious of sensible and intelligible objects by means of images. Images are interior to one’s soul, lack spatial extension, are directed towards objects, and announce their presence to the whole soul. The role of apprehension is to announce activities that occur in the soul-body compound or in parts of the soul, throughout the whole soul, by grasping these images. The secondary type is consciousness (parakolouthêsis), which is a second-order consciousness that ‘follows along’ with first-order states. The notion of subjectivity I am attributing to Plotinus at this level is related to having a first-person perspective. To have subjectivity in this sense is to experience the world from the standpoint of one’s own beliefs and desires, and to reflect on one’s own experience from this standpoint.

  • Chapter 3 - First Layer

  • D. M. Hutchinson, St Olaf College, Minnesota
  • Book:
    Plotinus on Consciousness
    Published online:
    24 April 2018
    Print publication:
    26 April 2018, pp 45-66

  • Summary

    The first layer of consciousness unifies the qualified body, and provides it with ownership of its bodily and psychic activities. Living beings are multitudes, which stand in need of being self-aware in order to achieve unity and self-sufficiency. The process of achieving unity and self-sufficiency begins with the qualified body, i.e., the animated body that is integrated with living things in the sensible world and is subject to affections. The basis for this process involves sympathy (sumpatheia) and awareness (sunaisthêsis). The former is an objective feature of a living being insofar as it constitutes it as a structured and coherent whole, whereas the latter is a subjective feature of a living being insofar as it recognizes that the parts and activities that constitute this whole belong to oneself or are one’s own. These two features are what enable living things to act as unified wholes despite being composed of functionally differentiated parts. The notion of subjectivity that I attribute to Plotinus at this level is related to being a subject and having ownership. To have subjectivity in this sense is to be the kind of being to whom psychic states can be correctly ascribed and to whom psychic states belong.

  • Chapter 1 - Self

  • D. M. Hutchinson, St Olaf College, Minnesota
  • Book:
    Plotinus on Consciousness
    Published online:
    24 April 2018
    Print publication:
    26 April 2018, pp 6-39

  • Summary

    Plotinus complicates the Platonic self by introducing levels of selfhood. By ‘level’ I mean a discrete stage in the actualization of the noetic self. The first level is the physical self, which is the subject of affections. The second is the dianoetic self, which is the subject of discursive reasoning and practical action. The third is the noetic self, which is the subject of contemplation. The noetic self is ‘identical’ to Intellect. Despite coming to identity with Intellect, we are only partially integrated into the intelligible world, and this partial integration narrows our mode of cognition. Due to this narrowing, our intellect cognizes the intelligible world from a point of view and we represent it under a certain aspect. Having this point of view individuates our intellect from other intellects, similar to the way a theorem that has been brought forward for analysis is individuated from other theorems. Representing the intelligible world under a certain aspect presupposes a perspective that is accessible only from the point of view of the person contemplating, and therefore involves subjectivity.

  • Chapter 2 - Consciousness Terms

  • D. M. Hutchinson, St Olaf College, Minnesota
  • Book:
    Plotinus on Consciousness
    Published online:
    24 April 2018
    Print publication:
    26 April 2018, pp 40-44

  • Summary

    The absence of a single term, in Greek, that corresponds to the English term ‘consciousness’ is not a sign that the Greeks lacked the concept of consciousness, or were uninterested in the phenomena of consciousness. Plotinus employs four terms to refer to cognitive activities that fall under the extension of consciousness - antilêpsis, parakolouthêsis, sunaisthêsis, and sunesis. Each of these terms expresses a different mode of consciousness, and in many places, could be directly translated as ‘consciousness’. However, to avoid blurring distinctions between these different modes of consciousness and to project the fewest modern presuppositions on Plotinus’ theory, I propose a translation scheme that I adhere to throughout the core chapters on consciousness. Moreover, I offer a summary of how Plotinus uses the terms based on my analysis of consciousness in the core chapters and in the Appendix.

Plotinus on Consciousness
  • D. M. Hutchinson
  • Published online:
    24 April 2018
    Print publication:
    26 April 2018
  • Plotinus is the first Greek philosopher to hold a systematic theory of consciousness. The key feature of his theory is that it involves multiple layers of experience: different layers of consciousness occur in different levels of self. This layering of higher modes of consciousness on lower ones provides human beings with a rich experiential world, and enables human beings to draw on their own experience to investigate their true self and the nature of reality. This involves a robust notion of subjectivity. However, it is a notion of subjectivity that is unique to Plotinus, and remarkably different from the Post-Cartesian tradition. Behind the plurality of terms Plotinus uses to express consciousness, and behind the plurality of entities to which Plotinus attributes consciousness (such as the divine souls and the hypostases), lies a theory of human consciousness. It is a Platonist theory shaped by engagement with rival schools of ancient thought.

  • Chapter 1 - Thymos

  • Chad Jorgenson, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munchen
  • Book:
    The Embodied Soul in Plato's Later Thought
    Published online:
    23 March 2018
    Print publication:
    05 April 2018, pp 6-38

  • Summary

    Thumos, often translated “spirit” or “spirited part”, acts as an intermediary between reason and appetite, imposing the dictates of reason on our irrational desires and pleasures. Yet the precise nature and function of the thumos is poorly understood and it has often been the object of criticism. Those who have defended it have portrayed it as essentially honour-seeking, reflecting the social dimension of our existence. Beginning from an analysis of the Homeric thumos, this chapter argues that those who see the essence of thumos as lying in honour or self-esteem are mistaken, and that thumos represents a primitive drive for excellence or pre-eminence, with the desire for honour and recognition being merely derivative. Its sensitivity to reason is the result of the fact that it depends on a certain rational conception of goodness for orientation. Rather than being an accidental property, its sensitivity to reason is built into its very constitution.

  • Chapter 7 - Eschatology

  • Chad Jorgenson, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munchen
  • Book:
    The Embodied Soul in Plato's Later Thought
    Published online:
    23 March 2018
    Print publication:
    05 April 2018, pp 164-200

  • Summary

    The eschatological myths are our only source for Plato’s views on the condition of the soul outside of the body. Rather than interpret them as literal accounts of the afterlife, this chapter argues that they result from the appropriation of traditional religious themes in an attempt to portray symbolically the condition of the disembodied soul, which cannot be the object of discursive knowledge. Each myth takes up the themes of the dialogue in which it is found, creating a myth that reflects in the form of images, the philosophical theories presented in the body of the dialogue, acting as a symbolic mirror for the condition of the soul as portrayed in the dialogue. The last dialogues see an eclipse of eschatological imagery, due in part to their highly technical nature, in part to Plato’s desire to merge the two sources of his eschatology: the cosmological account of reincarnation, which provides the “scientific” foundations for the immortality of the soul, and the accounts of post-mortem punishments, which serve an ethical-political function. Thus, in the Timaeus we find a wholly naturalized eschatology, deprived of supernatural trappings, in which the condition of the soul is perfectly mirrored in the condition of the body-soul complex as a whole.

  • Introduction

  • Chad Jorgenson, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munchen
  • Book:
    The Embodied Soul in Plato's Later Thought
    Published online:
    23 March 2018
    Print publication:
    05 April 2018, pp 1-5

  • Summary

    The Phaedo gives an otherworldly presentation of Platonic ethics in which the aim is to purify the soul, on quasi-religious lines, from its contamination from the body through the practice of philosophy. This vision forms the basis of Plotinus’ interpretation of Plato, which has been echoed by contemporary commentators, who have identified similar positions in Plato’s late dialogues. This approach requires a selective reading of passages from the Philebus, Timaeus, and Laws, however, which contain clear indications that central tenets of this position have been revised and which are dominated by language of harmonization and mixture, rather than separation and purification.

  • Chapter 4 - Measuring Pleasure

  • Chad Jorgenson, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munchen
  • Book:
    The Embodied Soul in Plato's Later Thought
    Published online:
    23 March 2018
    Print publication:
    05 April 2018, pp 88-117

  • Summary

    In the Republic, the Philosopher Kings are presented as first ascending towards intelligible reality before descending back into the realm of human affairs in order to govern. What form does this descent take in the analogous case of the rational soul? The main task of reason is to govern the body and the appetitive soul. However, because appetitive impulses are not directly responsive to the calculating power of reason, they are susceptible to the same sorts of perspectival illusions that we find in perception, with pleasures or pains that are nearer in time taking on disproportionate magnitude, thus leading us to indulge compulsively in short-term pleasure at the cost of long-term pain or to avoid short-term pain to maximize our long-term pleasure. This perspectival error cannot be corrected so long as we remain on the level of pleasure and pain themselves. Medicine, however, is able to look beyond sensations to the states of the body in which they are rooted, providing the rational soul with norms against which to measure the fittingness of desires. In this way, medicine serves as an intermediary art through which the rational soul imposes its rule on the body and appetitive soul.

  • Chapter 3 - Rational Soul

  • Chad Jorgenson, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munchen
  • Book:
    The Embodied Soul in Plato's Later Thought
    Published online:
    23 March 2018
    Print publication:
    05 April 2018, pp 60-87

  • Summary

    The logistikon or “rational soul” is the soul in the most proper sense, corresponding its condition in abstraction from the body. This does not, however, mean that that we are entitled to see in the rational soul a self or subject that would constitute the centre of personal identity. Plato consistently distinguishes between the intrinsic immortality of the rational soul and the imperfect immortality that can be attained by the individual through the practice of philosophy. In the Timaeus, the individual is compared to a celestial plant and the rational soul to its “roots” that helps it achieve an imperfect immortality. It is thus the concrete individual, as an embodied soul, who is the locus of ethical subjectivity and not the rational soul per se. The rational soul has as its proper object knowledge, but in the late dialogues this knowledge is not merely knowledge of intelligible Forms, as in the Phaedo. It also includes certain empirical sciences, in particular cosmology. Its excellence thus consists in the possession of knowledge of intelligible reality and true opinion about sensible reality.

Page 154 of 576