Originating Souls and Original Sin

Zusammenfassung: Die Lehre von der Erbsünde ist ein Thema von dauernder Faszination. Vergleichsweise wenig Aufmerksamkeit wurde der Lehre von der Erbsünde in Bezug auf die Diskussionen um den Ursprung der Seele zuteil. In diesem Beitrag argumentiere ich, dass unter den verschiedenen angebotenen Modellen zum Ursprung der Seele die Theorie eines emergenten Kreationismus, für die ich plädiere, gute metaphysische Potentiale zur Erklärung der Übertra-gung der Erbsünde bietet. Schlüsselwörter: ■ ■ ■ Summary: The doctrine of Original Sin is a subject of perennial theological fascination. Comparatively little attention has been paid, however, to the doctrine of original sin and discussions about the origin of the soul. In this article, I argue that of the various models of the soul's origin on offer, it is something akin to what I call emergent-creationism that naturally provides the most explanatory metaphysical resources for making sense of the transmission of original sin.

In Dante, the bottom of hell is cold and heaven is more like fire. This is because of ancient physics, in which fire (which is the substance of light) is the lightest, most heavenly element, and earth the lowest and coldest. Following Augustine, Dante uses this physics as the metaphorical landscape representing the movement of the soul, drawn by its love up to God or down to the bottom of the earth.

Eirene. Studia Graeca et Latina 54, 2018, 53-95, 2018

This article takes a closer look at what Plato’s dialogues tell us about the incorporeality of the soul as one of the well-established Platonic doctrines, on a par with the soul’s immortality and its self-moving nature. What motivates the proposed rereading is Plato’s timidity in describing the soul, human or not, as being entirely without body of any kind. The aim of the article is not to contest the obvious fact that Plato treats souls as essentially distinct from bodies, but to understand why the assumption of incorporeality receives no detailed discussion of its own. One possible answer is that such a theoretically rigorous discussion is always less important to Plato than his emphasis on the variety of actions and experiences ascribed to the soul both here and in the afterlife. While having an essential moral dimension that connects to the soul’s activity of thinking, these actions and experiences contribute to the description of the soul as a fully individual agent, akin to that of a person. To highlight the immortality of this agent, it is more opportune for Plato to start from various facets of the soul’s natural self-motion, while leaving aside possible arguments in favor of the soul’s full ontological bodilessness. In any case, the Platonic soul is introduced as a fundamental part of reality. Its natural agency can therefore be tackled separately from its explicit ontology. By this means, the agency—akin to human agency—that is attributed to the soul can retain its provisional ontological neutrality.

Criticisms and comments welcome, please do not quote.

Quaestiones Disputatae , 2017

In this paper I analyze a previously unpublished Leibniz text from the early 1700s. I give it the title " On unities and transmigration " since it contains an outline of his doctrine of unities and an examination of the doctrine of transmigration. The text is valuable because in it Leibniz considers three very specific versions of transmigration that he does not address elsewhere in his writings; these are: (1) where a soul is released by the destruction of its body and is then free to pass into another body; (2) where souls are exchanged without any destruction of bodies; and (3) where human souls (minds) are exchanged, again without any destruction of bodies. I show that when tackling these three versions of transmigration in " On unities and transmigration " , Leibniz develops a series of objections that are not to be found anywhere else in his published writings, despite his lifelong opposition to the doctrine of transmigration. This paper is completed by two appendices, the first of which presents the previously-unpublished " On unities and transmigration " text in full, in the original French (with all deletions indicated), while the second presents it in English translation.

Fierro, María Angélica, “Two conceptions of the body in Plato`s Phaedrus”, G. Boys-Stones, C. Gill & D. El.Murr (eds.), The Platonic Art of Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2013. ISBN-10: 1107038987, 2013. ISBN: 13-978-1107038981: 27-50 (con referato).

Prima facie there are two main, antithetical conceptions of the body (sōma) that can be traced to different stages in the development of Plato’s philosophy. On the one hand, the body is understood as an ‘obstacle’ (empodion) to rationality in (what we might call) ‘middle-dogmatic’ dialogues such as the Phaedo. On the other hand, according to ‘late-critical’ dialogues such as the Timaeus, the sōma has a positive role in the exercise of our rationality, as some recent studies have shown. Plato’s change of mind in this respect could be linked to the more general assumption that in his last period he overcame his rejection of the sensible world to which the body belongs. Against this interpretative background, I will argue that the Phaedrus presents itself as a puzzle in that here there are two notions of sōma that roughly overlap with the two mentioned above, namely: (a) the mortal body which is a ‘tomb’ (sēma), and which serves as an obstacle to gaining full knowledge of the eidetic realm; and (b) the body which functions as a ‘vehicle’ (ochēma) or ‘carriage’(harma) and is instrumental for ideal love. I will also claim that, according to the Phaedrus, this optimal kind of body is only possessed by the gods in a permanent and paradigmatic way. However, philosophers are, in principle, able to transform to a certain degree their mortal bodies into an ochēma in their present, incarnated existence and might even acquire a god-like, perfect body when their souls leave the cycle of reincarnations. I intend to show that the coexistence of these two (apparently contradictory) views of the body in the Phaedrus should be explained not just by seeing it as a transitional dialogue, in which Plato is fluctuating between two different approaches to the body, but

Studia z Historii Filozofii, 2015

What Kind of Souls Did Proclus Discover? , 2019

This paper tries to answer the question of what kind of souls Proclus discovered according to the report of his pupil Marinus in Vita Procli 23, 8. Unlike L. J. Rosan (1949), who thought that souls discovered by Proclus were demonic or intelligent ones, I argue that Marinus could have in mind so-called “hypercosmic” souls, that is, high divine souls situated at the beginning of the psychic level of reality immediately after the transcendent Monad of Soul and before the Soul of the World. Hypercosmic souls are called so not because of being entirely free from the physical cosmos, but because of animating immaterial luminous bodies and going thereby beyond the limits of the heavens. As such, these souls belong to the vertical series of the so-called ‘absolute' or ‘hypercosmic-encosmic’ gods, whose distinctive characteristic consists in the ability both to touch the sensible world and to remain above. Although souls of this kind were introduced into Neoplatonism by Proclus’ predecessors, he presumably was the first to discover them in Plato’s Timaeus and to demonstrate their existence, not from his own notions, but the very words of Plato.