Body and Soul in Hellenistic Philosophy

Description

Philosophers and doctors from the period immediately after Aristotle down to the second century CE were particularly focussed on the close relationships of soul and body; such relationships are particularly intimate when the soul is understood to be a material entity, as it was by Epicureans and Stoics; but even Aristotelians and Platonists shared the conviction that body and soul interact in ways that affect the well-being of the living human being. These philosophers were interested in the nature of the soul, its structure, and its powers. They were also interested in the place of the soul within a general account of the world. This leads to important questions about the proper methods by which we should investigate the nature of the soul and the appropriate relationships among natural philosophy, medicine, and psychology. This volume, part of the Symposium Hellenisticum series, features ten scholars addressing different aspects of this topic.

Brad Inwood is a Professor of Philosophy and Classics at Yale University, Connecticut. His major works include Ethics and Human Action in Early Stoicism (1985), The Poem of Empedocles, 2nd edition (2001), Reading Seneca: Stoic Philosophy at Rome (2005), Seneca: Selected Philosophical Letters (2007), Ethics after Aristotle (2014), and Stoicism: A Very Short Introduction (2018). He has edited or co-edited several volumes, including The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics (Cambridge, 2003), and from 2007 to 2015 he was the editor of Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. James Warren is a Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College. He is the author of Epicurus and Democritean Ethics (Cambridge, 2002), Facing Death: Epicurus and his Critics (2004), Presocratics (2007), and The Pleasures of Reason in Plato, Aristotle, and the Hellenistic Hedonists (Cambridge, 2014). He is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Epicureanism (2009), with Frisbee Sheffield, The Routledge Companion to Ancient Philosophy (2014), and with Jenny Bryan and Robert Wardy, Authors and Authorities in Ancient Philosophy (Cambridge, 2018).

'All major schools are fairly represented: the opening chapters focus on the influence of medical theories on Peripatetic and Stoic philosophy, the middle part examines certain problematic aspects of Epicurean and Stoic psychology, while the concluding chapters explore psychological issues relating to the Hellenistic Academy and Cicero.' Orestis Karatzoglou, Bryn Mawr Classical Review