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7 - Psychology
- Edited by R. J. Hankinson, University of Texas, Austin
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to Galen
- Published online:
- 28 September 2008
- Print publication:
- 14 August 2008, pp 184-209
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Summary
Galen does not trouble to establish the soul's existence; rather, he simply takes it to be evident that it does, and thus that man and living things are composed of a body and a soul. As far as its nature and essence are concerned, however, there appear to be waverings and differences, in particular between the two texts principally dedicated to pyschological themes: the great treatise On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato (PHP), which belongs to the writer's early mature period, and the late pamphlet The Faculties of the Soul Follow the Mixtures of the Body (QAM).
But it is not only this discrepancy between these major psychological works which poses problems for us. Remarks on the soul and its nature are scattered through several of his other works, and at first sight they seem to imply quite different conceptions of the soul, both in regard to its nature and concerning its relations with the body. Indeed, it has been supposed that Galen's views about the soul underwent a considerable evolution over time. But the exact point from which this evolution might be thought to have begun is controversial.
It is true that in the first book of the other great work of the author's maturity, On the Utility of the Parts (UP), which is roughly contemporaneous with PHP, Galen apparently talks in terms quite different from those he habitually employs elsewhere, since he speaks of the body as an instrument (organon) which the soul makes use of, which might seem starkly at odds with the other expressions he tends to use in this regard, and in particular with what he will say in QAM, where he posits a certain relation of dependence of souls and their capacities on the temperaments (kraseis: mixtures) of the bodies in which they reside.
21 - Stoic ethics
- from PART V - ETHICS AND POLITICS
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- By Brad Inwood, University of Toronto, Pierluigi Donini, State University of Milan
- Edited by Keimpe Algra, Universiteit Utrecht, The Netherlands, Jonathan Barnes, Université de Genève, Jaap Mansfeld, Universiteit Utrecht, The Netherlands, Malcolm Schofield, University of Cambridge
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- Book:
- The Cambridge History of Hellenistic Philosophy
- Published online:
- 28 March 2008
- Print publication:
- 09 December 1999, pp 675-738
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Summary
Foundations and first principles
Stoic ethics starts from foundations and first principles which are more explicit than those of most ancient ethical systems. Chrysippus announced in his Propositions in Physics that ‘there is no other or more fitting way to tackle the theory of good and bad things, the virtues, and happiness than on the basis of nature as a whole and the administration of the cosmos’ (Plu. De Stoicis In Platonis Rempublicam commentarii 1035c). This explicit statement about starting points puts the emphasis on nature in the cosmic sense, i.e. the nature of the entire providentially governed cosmos; but elsewhere Chrysippus turns to a more inclusive sense of nature: when he says ‘Where should I begin from and what should I take as the starting point for the appropriate and as the raw material for virtue, if I skip over nature and what accords with nature?’ (Plu. De communibus notitiis adversus Stoicos. 1069e), it is clear that the nature in question is not just cosmic. Crucial ethical concepts also find their roots in the nature of humans and in theories about what accords with human nature.
The central importance of human nature clearly goes back to the founder of the school. In the list of titles given by Diogenes Laertius (VII.4) we find a treatise On the life according to nature and one On impulse, also titled On human nature. But we have no record of an On goals or On virtue; indeed, the main evidence given for Zeno's views on the telos is the work On human nature (D.L. VII.87). Whatever the rôle of human as opposed to cosmic nature in Zeno's thinking, it is striking that the major ethical treatises (aside from the Republic) suggest a strong interest in the former.