CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2016
| Author | Herner, Máté |
|---|---|
| Title | Cosmic soul in Heraclitus |
| Summary | In his 2007 article “On the Physical Aspect of Psychē in Heraclitus” Gábor Betegh presents a new picture about the place of the soul in Heraclitus’ metaphysical landscape. He suggests that in Heraclitus, the term “soul” can refer not only to individual entities, but also to “a kind of stuff”, which then could be present not only in human beings, but also outside us. Thus, although the goal of the paper is to give an alternative account about what kind of an entity the soul is, the cosmological implications of this new interpretation also bring an old question back into the light, namely “Is there a world soul in Heraclitus’ cosmos?”. My aim in this paper is to pursue Betegh’s interpretation further by exploring its implications for this question. I will argue that the cosmic presence of “soul stuff” is indeed a necessary corollary of reading “soul” as a mass term, and, when combined with the other cosmological claims made by Heraclitus, it can even shed light on some characteristics of this cosmic soul: it is one unified whole with a heterogeneous physical constitution, which plays an important role in the cosmic order, nevertheless, not as the cosmic principle behind the universal rule of the Logos, but as the most intelligent and most powerful constituent of the cosmos. |
| Supervisor | Bodnár, István |
| Department | Philosophy MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2016/herner_mate.pdf |
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