Platonic Dualism Research Articles

Platonic Dualism Reconsidered

Abstract I argue that in the Phaedo, Plato maintains that the soul is located in space and is capable of locomotion and of interacting with the body through contact. Numerous interpreters have dismissed these claims as merely metaphorical, since they assume that as an incorporeal substance, the soul cannot possess spatial attributes. But careful examination of how Plato conceives of the body throughout his corpus reveals that he does not distinguish it from the soul in terms of spatiality. Furthermore, assigning spatial attributes to the soul plays an important role in Plato’s account of the relation of body and soul.

Dooyeweerd, Modal Aspects and Dynamic Evangelism

The present work identifies the modal aspect theory as a tool capable of evaluating an evangelistic outreach event and an example of such an outreach event is analysed using this theory. The event considered involves the offer, in a public space, of hospitality in the form of refreshments to passers-by. Modal aspect theory is shown to be capable of dynamic and fruitful application. It provides valuable insights into the way in which a biblically faithful outreach event may be organised and executed in such a way as to avoid reductionist influences, including Platonic dualism, and instead facilitate the establishment of a visible instance of the community of God’s people gathered, under his kingdom reign, in a public space into which unbelievers are welcomed.

Gabriella Gelardini. Deciphering the Worlds of Hebrews: Collected Essays

Gabriella Gelardini. <i>Deciphering the Worlds of Hebrews: Collected Essays</i>

The last enemy. On some receptions of Plato’s “Phaedo” in 18th-20th century philosophy and literature

Plato?s ?Phaedo? has taken up its position in European culture primarily thanks to its philosophical arguments for the immortality of the soul and the statement that for a true philosopher it is not enough to be free from the fear of death: one should strive for it. Christian theology adjusted these views so that they correspond to biblical eschatology and reproduced them repeatedly. However, there have always been and still are Christian theologians (including Orthodox Christian ones) who deny Platonic dualism as a world-view completely alien to Holy Scripture. It should be noted that criticism of the ?Phaedo? was always wider than the metaphysical question of monism or dualism in the comprehension of human nature; it gave rise to a certain existential philosophy focusing on the attitude towards death. In the Old and New Testament, death is never represented as some wonderful liberation from bodily existence that a philosopher should strive for: it is always horrible. The author of the article considers this problem of attitude to death across three dimensions: metaphysical, phenomenological, and syntactic. Syntactically, death imparts a character of logical sequence to our life, turning the totality of ?atomic facts? into fate. The image of fate makes our existence in time meanin?gful, and therefore becomes an existential phenomenology of the finitude of our existence. But eternal life does not depend on time, it is neither ?before? nor ?after?, and, hence, it is here in every tiniest moment of the present. Thus, the ?syntax of fate? determines the phenomenology of death, and the phenomenology of death determines the metaphysics of Eternity.

Dostoevsky’s Christ and Nietzsche’s Jesus as “Conceptual Characters”

In the present article, the author analyses the interpretation of the phenomenon of Christ by Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. The author uses comparative and hermeneutic methods of historical and philosophical research. Dostoevsky's Christ and Nietzsche's Jesus are interpreted as “conceptual characters” (G. Deleuze), occupying an important place in the philosophical constructions of both thinkers. Stating the epoch-making event of the “death of God” in European culture, they discover the origins of nihilism in Christianity itself and attempt (each in his own way) to recreate the original, pristine Christianity. Reconstruction of the original image of Christ makes it possible to comprehend not only the historical destiny of Christianity and the European portion of humanity, but also the prospects for overcoming the crisis of European and Russian (in the case of Dostoevsky) self-consciousness. It is argued that both interpretations, although far from orthodox Christianity, play the role of a central link in the development of the philosophic thinking of the Russian writer and German philosopher from the critical deposition of European humanism and metaphysics to new projects of human existence in the world. The conceptual images of Dostoevsky's Christ and Nietzsche's Jesus personally embody the spiritual attitudes and models of life that are timeless in nature, and at the same time serve as an expression of the “fundamental metaphysical positions” (M. Heidegger) of existential thinkers. The assertion of the absolute genuineness and beauty of the moral ideal of Christ allows Dostoevsky to return transcendence to the godless world – to substantiate the neo-Christian version of metaphysics, the religious-existential ontology. The “Glad Tidings” of Jesus, his life and death, appear in Nietzsche’s works as a practical elimination of transcendence, the Platonic dualism of the “true” and “visible” worlds. The spiritual attitude of Jesus reveals a direct affinity to Nietzsche's anti-metaphysical “philosophy of becoming”.

The Unshakable Kingdom through the Shaking of Heaven and Earth in Heb 12:26–29

Abstract In Heb 12:26–29, the author envisages the unshakable kingdom that will be established through the shaking of heaven and earth. The image of the cosmic shaking caused many interpreters to understand the present passage as the vision of the immaterial, ideal world, which will come after the destruction of the creation, reflecting the background of the Platonic dualism. Nevertheless, the usages of the main terms, χρηµατίζω and µετάθεσις, and the OT citations in the present passage suggest that this understanding is not indisputable. In this article, it is argued that some Jewish apocalyptic texts provide an alternative background of the text, offering a vision of the eschatological kingdom established by the revealed heavenly realm and the renewed creation.

El concepto de carne en la primera teología y el «cuerpo hablante»

El texto propone, a condición de contextualizar y releer históricamente el significante carne de la tradición judeo-cristiana, que el «margen más allá de la vida» que Lacan sitúa entre cuerpo y significante en 1960 remite a un lugar análogo al que ocupan tanto semántica como sintácticamente, los significantes latino caro y griego σαρζ, que traducen el hebreo bá-sar (carne). Por retroacción histórica, y dando prevalencia a la letra sobre el sentido, se vería que los primeros textos teológicos sitúan este significante en un lugar de «béance», o por lo menos de contradicción insostenible, donde nada representable ni pensable permite producir una síntesis. Interrumpiendo el dualismo platónico alma/cuerpo, la carne del cristianismo, que no es ni cuerpo ni alma, desorganiza la dualidad, abriendo a un sistema ternario cuerpo/carne/espíritu, referente conceptual que alimenta probablemente la última enseñanza de Lacan y donde la «carne» responde a un Real.

La Escatología en las Actas de los primeros mártires cristianos

The theme of eschatology is of special interest in Catholic as well as in Protestant Theology. The difficulty lies in the various interpretations which are given to the texts of Scripture and the Teaching of the Church. This diversity of opinion could be resolved, ideally, through the study of Tradition. But it is precisely here where we come upon a majore difficulty: the obscurity of early traditions relative to the truths which establish the existence of life after death. This article is part of a more extensive work which is dedicated to the study of the tradition of the first three centuries of the Church as contained in the Acts of the Martyrs, which has a special bearing on the problem at hand. It deals with the eschatological truths which, though already formulated, had not as yet been conceptualized during this early historical period of the Church. With this as a point of departure and by means of an existencial methodology we could reason to what these first qualified witnesses to the faith thought about as they were approaching death. The article begins with an examination of the underlying anthropology, because, as in well known, the multiple anthropological interpretations condition not only the subject of the so called "intermediate eschatology" but also the truths of eschatology. The result being that the Acts of the Martyrs makes itself understood in terms of a dualistic anthropology. The implicit idea here is not platonic dualism but simply a realistic interpretation based on personal experience which distinguishes between body and soul; while the body is being subjected to death and dissolution, the soul remains at peace awaiting its encounter with Christ. Employing this distinction made in the Acts of the Martyrs as a point of departure, the author reasons to the the belief that not only the martyrs but all those who die must undergo judgement before God, thus immediately initiating a state of reward or punishment. This conclusion sheds light on the much debated question of the intermediate state. Likewise, here in the Acts of the Martyrs, the fundamental truths of the faith are asserted: besides the endurance of the life of the soul after death and its immediate retribution, there are references to the particular and universal judgement, the future resurrection of the body, heaven and hell as the final state of man, after death, as well as the outstanding regard for the Parousia in the faith of these first centuries. All of these truths, and others as well, are found to be repeated again and again in the many dialogues held between the martyrs and their judges during their trials. The author also refers to texts which hold to the belief of purification after death. These testimonies are enlightening as regards the subject of purgatory, which various authors commonly ascribe to a later period, that is, to the works of St. Cyprian.

Aristotle’s harmony with Plato on separable and immortal soul

The possibility of a harmony between the psychological doctrine of Aristotle and that of Plato marks a significant issue within the context of the debate surrounding Aristotle’s putative opposition to or harmony with Plato’s philosophy. The standard interpretation of Aristotle’s conception of the soul being purely hylomorphic leaves no room for harmonisation with Plato, nor does a functionalist interpretation that reduces Aristotle’s psychological doctrine to physicalist terms. However, these interpretations have serious drawbacks, both in terms of ad-hoc explanations formulated in the developmentalist mode, and the misconstruing of some of the fundamental features of Aristotle’s psychological doctrine. A dualist interpretation that accepts Aristotle’s doctrine of some part of the soul being properly incorporeal, separable and immortal overcomes these drawbacks and, significantly, opens the door for Platonic harmonisation. Furthermore, it can be shown that the kind of immortality in question is also in line with the Platonic stance, due to a deep similarity between the conceptions of metaphysical and moral personhood held by Plato and his student. However, this Aristotelian dualism is not Platonic dualism simpliciter. Rather, it is best understood in terms of the division of labour between Aristotle and Plato suggested by the Neoplatonic commentators generally, and Simplicius in particular. I argue that though questions surrounding these issues and particularly the issue of reincarnation remain, an account of Aristotle’s psychological doctrine as dualist and in harmony with Plato’s view of the soul can be shown to be stronger than both standard hylomorphic and functionalist accounts, both exegetically and philosophically.

A Comparative-Philosophical Solution to the Problem of Part-Whole Relations Between רוח -Type Entities in the Hebrew Bible

What has been called “the pneumatology” of the Hebrew Bible is generally held to be an unsolved problem. To this day, available research operates on the assumption of a “missing link” between theological, cosmological, and anthropological domains distinguished within the meta-language. This is indeed evident from a comparative-philosophical perspective in that the conceptual background for רוח -type entities as encountered in scholarly discourse comes across as ontologically disjointed and metaphysically fragmented. In the present article, the author argues that the riddle of “The One and the Many” is a pseudo-problem generated by anachronistic Platonic dualism supervening on inquiries into the assumed nature of רוח as “Ursubstanz” and the mereology of רוח -type entities in the world of the text. In addition, a unified theory is put forward with reference to the problem of part-whole relations as can be reconstructed from the perspective of more monistic conceptions of spirit in the associated history and philosophy of religion.

Comparison between Hellenistic Philosophy and Pauline Christianity: Focusing on the Problems of Platonic Dualism and Stoic Freedom

Comparison between Hellenistic Philosophy and Pauline Christianity: Focusing on the Problems of Platonic Dualism and Stoic Freedom

Dualismo platonismo gnosticismo nell’interpretazione inattuale di Ugo Bianchi

The article attempts to shed light on the way the reflections of Ugo Bianchi on the relationship between Platonic dualism and the gnostic dualism remain useful to return to study the Gnosticism from the point of view of the history of religions. In the last twenty years a field of studies now dominant in fact deconstructed the category of Gnosticism, considering it a deviant modern interpretation essentially indebted to the ancient heresiological classifications. The way in which Bianchi has addressed the issue of the Gnostic dualism is important to counter this type of interpretation because it helps to understand the central role this type of dualism has in the development of the Gnostic myth, role overlooked by many of the most recent interpretations. In the first part, the article examines the interpretation of Bianchi, exploring in the second part the way in which it is still useful today for a better understanding of the Valentinian myth.

Капелла Медичи: семантический аспект.

The Medici Chapel (or the New Sacristy) of the Church of San Lorenzo in Florence (1520–1534) is one of the greatest masterpieces of Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) and the whole Renaissance. At the same time, it is one of the most enigmatic and polysemantic works of that epoch. The abundance of the concepts of “decoding” the New Sacristy’s imagery proposed by the previous researchers does not exhaust the depth of its content and leaves us space for new interpretations.The article focuses on the analysis of the semantic structure of the Medici Chapel. During the reconstruction of Michelangelo’s intent, the author has examined the architectural, sculptural, and pictorial elements, both implemented or not, from which the ensemble of the Medici Chapel had been drawn. Michelangelo’s masterpiece is usually considered in connection with the views of Plato, Dante, and Savonarola. The author proposes a new look at the range of ideas. The concept of the chapel, according to the author, is mainly determined by the idea of the Last Judgment. In the new interpretation of the ensemble, a crucial role is played by the sculptures of four Times of Day. The master reinterpreted the cyclical nature of these images linking them to Apocalypse of John the Evangelist (Revelation, 10: 6). It has been concluded that the concept of the imagery of the Medici Chapel embodied three conceptual complexes: Platonic dualism, Dante’s three-part structure of the underworld, and the idea of posthumous retribution in its most complete form — the Last Judgment.

關文讀後——兼談儒家的靈魂與倫理

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in Chinese; abstract in English only.Kwan addresses near death experiences (NDEs) from different perspectives. His attitude is reasonable and humble. Basically, he indicates that scientific studies of NDE can neither prove nor falsify the existence of the soul. Given this circumstance, religious explanations cannot be excluded as unreasonable. He also rightly points out that one may not draw on NDEs to defend only one particular religious view, such as that of Christianity. This commentary essay suggests that it may also be heuristic to study NDE from a Confucian metaphysical perspective. The classical Confucian view considers the basic element of the cosmos to be qi (air/energy 氣), which is believed to be both material and spiritual at the same time. Thus, Confucianism has kept a distance from either Platonic dualism or modern materialistic reductionism. The soul under the Confucian conception includes two parts: the hun (魂the intelligent soul) and the po (魄the animal soul). When a human being dies, “the intelligent soul returns to heaven; the body and the animal soul return to the earth.” Accordingly, it is crucial for Confucians to perform ritual sacrifices to seek the union of a deceased ancestor’s soul. NDE may take place at the moment the hun and po have just separated, but are not yet far from each other.DOWNLOAD HISTORY | This article has been downloaded 54 times in Digital Commons before migrating into this platform.

Dualités présocratiques

This papers tries to show at first that the dualism Plutarchus attributed in the De Iside et Osiride to most ancient thinkers, mainly «presocratics», has been largely influenced by the doxographical overview given by Aristotle at the beginning of the Metaphysics, which not only assumed that Empedocles was the first to introduce principles of Good and Evil, but also compared the theory of Anaxagoras to the alleged platonic dualism of the One and the Other. If dualities are quite present and important in some of the main theories of the so‑called presocratic philosophers, the question remains to determine in which cases these dualities can be compared to dualism in the sense this word has taken since Hyde. The second part of this article will thus consist to try to answer this question on the ground of three examples of thinkers for whom dualities played a crucial role : Alcmaeon, Parmenides and, chiefly, Empedocles, who had obviously linked Love and Strife to an axiological pattern in his Katharmoi.

Jorie Graham's FISSION

Even though Helen Vendler has stated that “Platonic dualism is both [Jorie] Graham's donnee and her demon” (92)—suggesting that Plato's thought is central to all of her work—no critic has made more...

How Plotinus’ Soul Animates his Body: The Argument for the Soul-Trace at Ennead 4.4.18.1-9

Abstract In this paper I offer an analysis of Plotinus’ argument for the existence of a quasi-psychic entity, the so-called ‘trace of soul’, that functions as an immanent cause of life for an organism’s body. I argue that Plotinus posits this entity primarily in order to account for the body’s possession of certain quasi-psychic states that are instrumental in his account of soul-body interaction. Since these quasi-psychic states imply that an organism’s body has vitality of its own (a claim for which Plotinus also finds support in the Phaedo), and Platonic souls are no part or aspect of any body, Plotinus draws the conclusion that the soul must be a cause of the body’s life by imparting a quasi-psychic qualification to it. In so doing, Plotinus introduces elements of hylomorphism into Platonist psychology, and addresses a problem for the animation of the body that Platonic soul-body dualism may plausibly be thought to face.

VIRTUALIDAD ESTÉTICA Y REALIDAD

Contra el dualismo platónico, el arte muestra que la virtualidad y la realidad no están enfrentadas. La obra de arte es virtualidad, pero no está ontológicamente separada de la realidad que representa. La virtualidad estética según Gadamer supone un crecimiento del ser de la realidad, precisamente hacia su propia verdad. La obra de arte por tanto no representa el ser de la realidad sino lo que puede ser.

Varieties of Dualism

Thomas Aquinas argues that matter is informed by a rational soul to compose a human person. But a person may survive her body's death since a rational soul is able to exist and function without matter. This leads to the typical characterization of Aquinas as a dualist. Thomistic dualism, however, is distinct from both Platonic dualism and various accounts of substance dualism offered by philosophers such as Richard Swinburne. For both Plato and Swinburne, a person is identical to an immaterial soul that is contingently related to a human body. For Aquinas, a human person is composed of her soul and the matter it informs, but is not identical to either metaphysical component. I explicate Thomistic dualism while critically analyzing Swinburne's account. I conclude that Aquinas's account has the resources to address a central issue that arises for substance dualism.

Five Bodies—and a Sixth

What one takes to be a body is identified initially as what is available to sensing. Sensing and reflecting are not so available. How one conceives of their relation admits of at least six possibilities exhibited in the history of philosophy: Hobbesian materialism, Berkleyan idealism, Platonic dualism of soul and body, Aristotelian hylomorphism, Cartesian dualism of thought and extension, and a Leibnizian-Whiteheadian view of psycho-physical co-implication. The latter view redraws the conceptual map in a way most in keeping with experience as a whole and with neural physiology in particular.