The Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers - Vol I: 1

It is Allah that takes the Nafs at death: Verily in this are Signs for those who contemplate. In Jainism, every living being, from plant or bacterium to human, has a soul and the concept forms the very basis of Jainism. According to Jainism, there is no beginning or end to the existence of soul. It is eternal in nature and changes its form until it attains liberation.

Irrespective of which state the soul is in, it has got the same attributes and qualities.

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The difference between the liberated and non-liberated souls is that the qualities and attributes are manifested completely in case of siddha liberated soul as they have overcome all the karmic bondages whereas in case of non-liberated souls they are partially exhibited. Concerning the Jain view of the soul, Virchand Gandhi said.

If we believe that the soul is to be controlled by the body then soul misses its power. In Judaism the soul was believed to be given by God to Adam as mentioned in Genesis ,. Then the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. Judaism relates the quality of one's soul to one's performance of the commandments mitzvot and reaching higher levels of understanding, and thus closeness to God. A person with such closeness is called a tzadik. Kabbalah and other mystic traditions go into greater detail into the nature of the soul.

Kabbalah separates the soul into five elements, corresponding to the five worlds:. Kabbalah also proposed a concept of reincarnation, the gilgul. See also nefesh habehamit the "animal soul". The Scientology view is that a person does not have a soul, it is a soul. A person is immortal, and may be reincarnated if they wish. The Scientology term for the soul is " thetan ", derived from the Greek word "theta", symbolizing thought.

Scientology counselling called auditing addresses the soul to improve abilities, both worldly and spiritual. According to Nadya Yuguseva, a shaman from the Altai, "A woman has 40 souls; men have just one". Sikhism considers soul atma to be part of God Waheguru. Worship Him with love. The atma or soul according to Sikhism is an entity or "spiritual spark" or "light" in our body because of which the body can sustain life.

On the departure of this entity from the body, the body becomes lifeless — No amount of manipulations to the body can make the person make any physical actions. It is the roohu or spirit or atma , the presence of which makes the physical body alive. Many religious and philosophical traditions support the view that the soul is the ethereal substance — a spirit; a non material spark — particular to a unique living being.

Such traditions often consider the soul both immortal and innately aware of its immortal nature, as well as the true basis for sentience in each living being. The concept of the soul has strong links with notions of an afterlife, but opinions may vary wildly even within a given religion as to what happens to the soul after death. Many within these religions and philosophies see the soul as immaterial, while others consider it possibly material.

A living being that loses any of them is said to have mental illness or unconsciousness , while a dead soul may reincarnate to a disability , lower desire realms , or may even be unable to reincarnate. In theological reference to the soul, the terms "life" and "death" are viewed as emphatically more definitive than the common concepts of " biological life " and "biological death".

Because the soul is said to be transcendent of the material existence, and is said to have potentially eternal life , the death of the soul is likewise said to be an eternal death. Thus, in the concept of divine judgment , God is commonly said to have options with regard to the dispensation of souls, ranging from Heaven i.

Typically both Heaven and hell are said to be eternal, or at least far beyond a typical human concept of lifespan and time. According to Louis Ginzberg , soul of Adam is the image of God. In Brahma Kumaris , human souls are believed to be incorporeal and eternal. God is considered to be the Supreme Soul, with maximum degrees of spiritual qualities, such as peace, love and purity.

In Helena Blavatsky 's Theosophy , the soul is the field of our psychological activity thinking, emotions, memory, desires, will, and so on as well as of the so-called paranormal or psychic phenomena extrasensory perception, out-of-body experiences, etc. However, the soul is not the highest, but a middle dimension of human beings. Higher than the soul is the spirit, which is considered to be the real self; the source of everything we call "good"—happiness, wisdom, love, compassion, harmony, peace, etc.

While the spirit is eternal and incorruptible, the soul is not. The soul acts as a link between the material body and the spiritual self, and therefore shares some characteristics of both.

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The soul can be attracted either towards the spiritual or towards the material realm, being thus the "battlefield" of good and evil. It is only when the soul is attracted towards the spiritual and merges with the Self that it becomes eternal and divine. Rudolf Steiner differentiated three stages of soul development, which interpenetrate one another in consciousness: In Surat Shabda Yoga , the soul is considered to be an exact replica and spark of the Divine.

Similarly, the spiritual teacher Meher Baba held that "Atma, or the soul, is in reality identical with Paramatma the Oversoul — which is one, infinite, and eternal Eckankar , founded by Paul Twitchell in , defines Soul as the true self; the inner, most sacred part of each person. The ancient Greeks used the word " ensouled " to represent the concept of being "alive", indicating that the earliest surviving western philosophical view believed that the soul was that which gave the body life.

Cornford quotes Pindar by saying that the soul sleeps while the limbs are active, but when one is sleeping, the soul is active and reveals "an award of joy or sorrow drawing near" in dreams.

Erwin Rohde writes that an early pre- Pythagorean belief presented the soul as lifeless when it departed the body, and that it retired into Hades with no hope of returning to a body. Drawing on the words of his teacher Socrates, Plato considered the psyche to be the essence of a person, being that which decides how we behave.

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He considered this essence to be an incorporeal, eternal occupant of our being. Plato says that even after death, the soul exists and is able to think. He believed that as bodies die, the soul is continually reborn in subsequent bodies. However, Aristotle believed that only one part of the soul was immortal namely the intellect logos. The Platonic soul consists of three parts: Plato also compares the three parts of the soul or psyche to a societal caste system. According to Plato's theory, the three-part soul is essentially the same thing as a state's class system because, to function well, each part must contribute so that the whole functions well.

Logos keeps the other functions of the soul regulated. In Aristotle's view, the primary activity, or full actualization, of a living thing constitutes its soul. For example, the full actualization of an eye, as an independent organism, is to see its purpose or final cause. This organization between form and matter is necessary for any activity, or functionality, to be possible in a natural being.

Using an artifact non-natural being as an example, a house is a building for human habituation, but for a house to be actualized requires the material wood, nails, bricks, etc. However, this does not imply that a house has a soul. In regards to artifacts, the source of motion that is required for their full actualization is outside of themselves for example, a builder builds a house.

In natural beings, this source of motion is contained within the being itself. The various faculties of the soul , such as nutrition, movement peculiar to animals , reason peculiar to humans , sensation special, common, and incidental and so forth, when exercised, constitute the "second" actuality, or fulfillment, of the capacity to be alive. For example, someone who falls asleep, as opposed to someone who falls dead, can wake up and live their life, while the latter can no longer do so. Aristotle identified three hierarchical levels of natural beings: For these groups, he identified three corresponding levels of soul, or biological activity: Aristotle's discussion of the soul is in his work, De Anima On the Soul.

Although mostly seen as opposing Plato in regard to the immortality of the soul, a controversy can be found in relation to the fifth chapter of the third book: In this text both interpretations can be argued for, soul as a whole can be deemed mortal, and a part called "active intellect" or "active mind" is immortal and eternal. Following Aristotle, Avicenna Ibn Sina and Ibn al-Nafis , a Persian philosopher , further elaborated upon the Aristotelian understanding of the soul and developed their own theories on the soul. They both made a distinction between the soul and the spirit, and the Avicennian doctrine on the nature of the soul was influential among the Scholastics.

Some of Avicenna's views on the soul include the idea that the immortality of the soul is a consequence of its nature, and not a purpose for it to fulfill. In his theory of "The Ten Intellects", he viewed the human soul as the tenth and final intellect. While he was imprisoned, Avicenna wrote his famous "Floating Man" thought experiment to demonstrate human self-awareness and the substantial nature of the soul.

He argues that in this scenario one would still have self-consciousness. He thus concludes that the idea of the self is not logically dependent on any physical thing , and that the soul should not be seen in relative terms , but as a primary given, a substance. Avicenna generally supported Aristotle's idea of the soul originating from the heart , whereas Ibn al-Nafis rejected this idea and instead argued that the soul "is related to the entirety and not to one or a few organs ".

He further criticized Aristotle's idea whereby every unique soul requires the existence of a unique source, in this case the heart. Following Aristotle whom he referred to as "the Philosopher" and Avicenna, Thomas Aquinas —74 understood the soul to be the first actuality of the living body.

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Consequent to this, he distinguished three orders of life: Concerning the human soul, his epistemological theory required that, since the knower becomes what he knows, the soul is definitely not corporeal—if it is corporeal when it knows what some corporeal thing is, that thing would come to be within it. Furthermore, since the rational soul of human beings is a subsistent form and not something made of matter and form, it cannot be destroyed in any natural process.

In his discussions of rational psychology, Immanuel Kant — identified the soul as the "I" in the strictest sense, and argued that the existence of inner experience can neither be proved nor disproved. We cannot prove a priori the immateriality of the soul, but rather only so much: It is from the "I", or soul, that Kant proposes transcendental rationalization, but cautions that such rationalization can only determine the limits of knowledge if it is to remain practical. Psychologist James Hillman's archetypal psychology is an attempt to restore the concept of the soul, which Hillman viewed as the "self-sustaining and imagining substrate" upon which consciousness rests.

Hillman described the soul as that "which makes meaning possible, [deepens] events into experiences, is communicated in love, and has a religious concern", as well as "a special relation with death". The current scientific consensus across all fields is that the existence of any kind of soul in the traditional sense is incompatible with a modern scientific understanding of the human mind, which holds that the human being is merely a complex machine that operates based on the exact same physical laws as all other objects in the universe, according to Julien Musolino, a cognitive scientist and professor at Rutgers University , [] who states that there is currently no scientific evidence whatsoever to support the existence of the soul [] and there is considerable evidence that seems to indicate that souls do not exist.

Neuroscience as an interdisciplinary field, and its branch of cognitive neuroscience particularly, operates under the ontological assumption of physicalism. In other words, it assumes—in order to perform its science—that only the fundamental phenomena studied by physics exist.

Thus, neuroscience seeks to understand mental phenomena within the framework according to which human thought and behavior are caused solely by physical processes taking place inside the brain, and it operates by the way of reductionism by seeking an explanation for the mind in terms of brain activity. To study the mind in terms of the brain several methods of functional neuroimaging are used to study the neuroanatomical correlates of various cognitive processes that constitute the mind. The evidence from brain imaging indicates that all processes of the mind have physical correlates in brain function.

Identification of causation , and of necessary and sufficient conditions requires explicit experimental manipulation of that activity. If manipulation of brain activity changes consciousness, then a causal role for that brain activity can be inferred. In a loss-of-function also called "necessity" experiment, a part of the nervous system is diminished or removed in an attempt to determine if it is necessary for a certain process to occur, and in a gain-of-function also called "sufficiency" experiment, an aspect of the nervous system is increased relative to normal.

In addition, neuroscientists are also investigating how the mind develops with the development of the brain. Carroll has written that the idea of a soul is incompatible with quantum field theory QFT. He writes that for a soul to exist: Within QFT, there can't be a new collection of 'spirit particles' and 'spirit forces' that interact with our regular atoms, because we would have detected them in existing experiments.

Quantum indeterminism has been invoked by some theorists as a solution to the problem of how a soul might interact with the brain, but neuroscientist Peter Clarke found errors with this viewpoint, noting there is no evidence that such processes play a role in brain function; and concluded that a Cartesian soul has no basis from quantum physics. Some parapsychologists have attempted to establish, by scientific experiment, whether a soul separate from the brain exists, as is more commonly defined in religion rather than as a synonym of psyche or mind.

Milbourne Christopher and Mary Roach have argued that none of the attempts by parapsychologists have yet succeeded. In Duncan MacDougall conducted an experiment in which he made weight measurements of patients as they died. He claimed that there was weight loss of varying amounts at the time of death; he concluded the soul weighed 21 grams.

Park has written that MacDougall's experiments "are not regarded today as having any scientific merit" and the psychologist Bruce Hood wrote that "because the weight loss was not reliable or replicable, his findings were unscientific. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For other uses, see Soul disambiguation.

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This section does not cite any sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. October Learn how and when to remove this template message. Ancient Egyptian concept of the soul and Religions of the ancient Near East. Soul in the Bible and Christian mortalism. Immortality of the soul , Christian conditionalism , Christian mortalism , and Annihilationism.

Jain philosophy and Jainism and non-creationism. This article relies too much on references to primary sources. Please improve this by adding secondary or tertiary sources. April Learn how and when to remove this template message. Plato's tripartite theory of soul. This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. December Learn how and when to remove this template message. Retrieved 1 December Archived from the original on 20 December Retrieved 14 December A Guide for the Perplexed London: Continuum, , pp.

Retrieved 12 November An Ancient Monument to the Soul". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 24 April Retrieved 18 November In a mountainous kingdom in what is now southeastern Turkey, there lived in the eighth century B. The words instructed mourners to commemorate his life and afterlife with feasts "for my soul that is in this stele.

Archived from the original on 3 March Retrieved 23 February Archived from the original on 4 March Grove, , p. Theodore de Bary NY: Columbia UP, , p. A Short History of Buddhism. The Republic is, with the Laws , an order of magnitude longer than any other Platonic dialogue. Readers today are likely to think of the Republic as the home par excellence of political philosophy. But that view has also been challenged by scholars who see it as primarily an ethical dialogue, driven by the question of why the individual should be just Annas This section argues that the ethical and political concerns, and purposes, of the dialogue are inextricably intertwined.

Near the beginning of the dialogue, a challenge is launched by the character Thrasymachus, mentioned above, asserting that all actual cities define justice so as to serve the advantage of the rulers. He takes this to mean that the laws which their subjects are bound to obey and the associated ethical virtue of justice which they are enjoined to cultivate traditionally seen as the necessary bond among citizens and the justification for political rule , in fact amount to a distorted sham.

See the entry on Callicles and Thrasymachus. Socrates then launches a speculation as to the origins of cities: However, this origin already gives rise to a proto-ethical dimension, first insofar as the members of the primitive city each do their own work the structure of what will emerge as the virtue of justice , which is fleshed out when political rulers are established who are able to use their wisdom to help their subjects maintain a psychological balance in their souls that approximates, if it does not fully embody, the virtues of moderation and justice and so enables them to enjoy a unified rather than a divided soul.

The question of why the individual should be just, figured at the outset by the contrast with the putatively happy tyrant, is resolved eventually by demonstrating that the tyrant will necessarily, in virtue of the disorder of his soul, be at once maximally unjust and maximally unhappy. That resolution rests on the division of the soul into three parts by which the Republic places moral psychology at the heart of political philosophy. In the soul and city respectively, the rational part or class should rule; the spirited part or class should act to support the rule of that rational part; and the appetitive part of the soul and producing class in the city should accept being governed by it.

Both soul and city are therefore in need of, and capable of exhibiting, four virtues e—a. Two of these pertain to individual parts: Two however are defined by relations between the parts: A just soul will indeed reliably issue in traditionally just actions, such as refraining from theft, murder, and sacrilege contra Sachs , who argues that Plato has simply abandoned the usual domain of justice. To be a truly effective, because wholly unified, agent, one must be just, moderate, courageous and wise.

The just person enjoys psychic health, which is advantageous no matter how he is treated fairly or unfairly by gods and men; correspondingly, the just society enjoys civic unity, which is advantageous in being the fundamental way to avoid the assumed supreme evil of civil war. In contrast, all other cities are characterized as riven by civil war between the rich and the poor; none of them counts as a single, unified city at all see Rep.

In particular, Book V of the Republic suggests that a sufficiently unified regime can be achieved only by depriving its guardian-rulers of private property and of private families, instead making them live in austere communal conditions in which they are financially supported by their money-making subjects and allowed to procreate only when and with whom will best serve the city.

In Book II of his Politics , Aristotle would read this prescription as applying to all the citizens in the city envisaged in the Republic , and both he and, later on, Cicero would deplore what they construed as this abolition of private property. Even those following and radicalizing Plato precisely by advocating the abolition of property for all the citizens, rather than only deprivation of it for the rulers, as would the sixteenth-century Sir Thomas More, were generally opposed to if not also scandalized by the suggestion of procreative communism. The Republic initiates a further tradition in political philosophy by laying out a template for the integration of ethics and political philosophy into a comprehensive account of epistemology and metaphysics.

In the Republic , the knowledge required for rule is not specialized, but comprehensive: The rulers are philosophers who take turns over their lifetime in exercising collective political authority. To that extent the Republic presents a paradox: In the Statesman , Plato turns his attention to precisely the topics identified at the end of the last section above.

The discussion is interrupted but ultimately enriched by a story or myth in which politics is shown to be a matter of humans ruling other humans in place of living under divine guidance. That human expertise of statecraft is ultimately distinguished by its knowledge of the correct timing kairos as to when its closest rivals should be exercised: The statesman is wholly defined by the possession of that knowledge of when it is best to exercise these and the other subordinate forms of expertise, and by the role of exercising that knowledge in binding or weaving the different groups of citizens together, a knowledge which depends on a broader philosophical grasp but which is peculiarly political El Murr Here, political philosophy operates not just to assimilate politics to a broader metaphysical horizon but also to identify its specificity.

The Statesman also raises an important question about the nature and value of rule by law, as opposed to rule by such expert knowledge as embodied in a rare and likely singular individual. By contrast, the Statesman analyzes law as in principle a stubborn and imperfect substitute for the flexible deployment of expertise e—c.

However, the principal interlocutors of the latter dialogue go on to agree that if the choice is between an ignorant imitator of the true political expert who changes the laws on the basis of whim, and a law-bound polity, the latter would be preferable, so bringing law back into the picture as an alternative to the ideal after all. For an alternative argument, that the second-best city is not meant to be Magnesia, see Bartels In this second-best city, the legislation for which is sketched out in speech by the three interlocutors of the dialogue, politics still aims at virtue, and at the virtue of all the citizens, but those citizens all play a part in holding civic offices; the ordinary activities of politics are shared, in what is described as a mixture of monarchy and democracy.

Another influential aspect of the Laws is its positive evaluation of the nature of law itself as a topic proper to political philosophy. Some scholars have found that to be a distinctively democratic and liberal account of law Bobonich ; see also the entry on Plato on utopia. That arguably goes too far in a proceduralist direction, given that the value of law remains its embodiment of reason or understanding nous , so that while adding persuasive preludes is a better way to exercise the coercive force of law, no agreement on the basis of persuasion could justify laws which departed from the standard of nous Laks Nevertheless, the emphasis on law as an embodiment of reason, and as articulating the political ideals of the city in a form that its citizens are to study and internalize Nightingale b, , is distinctive to this dialogue.

The Statesman however reserves a special extraordinary role a higher office, or perhaps not a formal office as such for the statesman whenever he is present in the city Lane b. Has Plato in the Laws given up on his earlier idealism which rested on the possibility of the philosopher-king, or on the idea of the perfectly knowledgeable statesman?

If so, should that be interpreted as disillusionment or pessimism on his part, or as a more democratic or liberal turn? Or are there more fundamental continuities that connect and underlie even these seeming shifts? These questions structure the broad debate about the meaning and trajectory of Platonic political philosophy for an overview, compare Klosko to Schofield Living much of his life as a resident alien in Athens, with close familial ties to the extra- polis Macedonian court which would, near the end of his life, bring Athens under its sway, Aristotle at once thematized the fundamental perspective of the Greek citizenship of equals and at the same time acknowledged the claim to rule of anyone of truly superior political knowledge.

Biological creatures work to fulfill the realization of their end or telos , a specific way of living a complete life characteristic of the plants or animals of their own kind, which is the distinctive purpose that defines their fundamental nature—just as human artifacts are designed and used for specific ends.

While every human being, in acting, posits a particular telos as the purpose making that action intelligible, this should ideally reflect the overall natural telos of humans as such. Here, however, arises a problem unique to humans. Whereas other animals have a single telos defining their nature living the full life of a frog, including reproduction, being the sole telos of each frog, in the example used by Lear , humans both have a distinctive human nature—arising from the unique capacity to use language to deliberate about how to act — and also share in the divine nature in their ability to use reason to understand the eternal and intelligible order of the world.

Practical reason is the domain of ethics and politics, the uniquely human domain. Yet the political life is not necessarily the best life, compared with that devoted to the divinely shared human capacity for theoretical reason and philosophical thinking compare Nicomachean Ethics I with X. In fact he closes his Nicomachean Ethics by remarking that for most people, the practice of ethics can only be ensured by their being governed by law, which combines necessity compulsion with reason.

Because, for most people, the ethical life presupposes government by law, the student of ethics must become a student of political science, studying the science of legislation in light of the collection of constitutions assembled by Aristotle and his school in the Lyceum. All but part of one of the over one hundred items in this collection reported in antiquity have been lost: At the beginning of Book IV b1—39 , Aristotle offers a fourfold account of what the expertise regarding constitutions must encompass.

As glossed by Eugene Garver The second, the best relative to circumstances, starts with the material cause and organizes political inquiry around the best that can be made out of given material. The third, the best on a hypothesis, starts not from the true end of politics, but any posited end, and so looks for means and devices that will preserve any given constitution.

The Politics begins by setting the stage for the first kind of understanding of constitutions identified above, by offering an analysis of the teleological ends of life and the human capacity for speech which together support its two most famous contentions: In defective regimes, the good citizen and the good man may come apart. The good citizen of a defective regime is one whose character suits the particular regime in question whether oligarchic, or democratic, say and equips him to support it loyally; hence he may be deformed or stunted by a role of holding or a role of holding accountable offices defined on incorrect terms.

Here the limitations and exclusions among actual humans licensed by the principled formulation of the possibility—requiring actual realization—of human virtue become apparent. Aristotle recognizes that there are other possible claims, or as it were titles, to political rule: Or the one best man?

He develops in particular detail the arguments that might be made on behalf of the many and the knowledgeable one respectively. Aristotle uses the image of a collectively provided feast to illustrate the potential superiority of such collective judgement; how to interpret this image whether as a potluck, Waldron , Wilson , Ober , or in a more aggregative way, Bouchard , Cammack , Lane a and other images that he uses is a matter of some renewed controversy for a recent review, see Bobonich But the lesson Aristotle draws from the various images is clearly limited to vindicating a role of the many in electing and holding accountable incumbents of the highest offices rather than in holding such offices themselves III.

The many can contribute to virtuous decision-making in their collective capacity of judgment—presumably in assemblies and juries—but not as individual high officials Lane a, b, Poddighe In the contrasting case of the one supremely excellent person, Aristotle argues that such a person has, strictly speaking, no equals, and so cannot be made justly to take a turn in rule, holding office for a time, as one citizen among others.

Instead it is right that such a person should rule without the term limits that political office would ordinarily require:. If, however, there be some one person, or more than one, although not enough to make up the full complement of a state, whose excellence is so pre-eminent that the excellence or the political capacity of all the rest admit of no comparison with his or theirs, he or they can be no longer regarded as part of a state; for justice will not be done to the superior, if he is reckoned only as the equal of those who are so far inferior to him in excellence and in political capacity.

Such a man may truly be deemed a god among men …. On one recent reading, this implies that virtuous monarchy does indeed count as a political regime, albeit one in which only one or a few of the citizens are eligible to hold the highest offices Riesbeck Yet this argument is left at the hypothetical level. In the absence of such a superlatively virtuous, even godlike individual, the formulation of political rule as involving some kind of turn-taking by a large body of sufficiently virtuous citizens remains preeminent though even this should not be read to imply that all should in fact alternate in office, or even that all should necessarily be eligible for all offices.

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As Aristotle turn to consideration of the best constitutions relative to particular and imperfect circumstances, the major issue is conflict between rival factions over the basis for defining equality and so justice. Whereas that Platonic text had distinguished monarchy from tyranny, aristocracy from oligarchy, and good from bad democracy on the basis of obedience to law all these regimes being conceived as lacking the genuine political knowledge of the true statesman , Aristotle instead makes the dividing line the question of ruling for the common advantage as opposed to ruling for the advantage of a single faction.

Aristotle augments this analysis with appeals to historical narrative, overlapping with the narrative of Athenian political history offered in the Constitution of Athens compiled by him or, more likely, by members of his school. On his telling in the Politics , Athenian democracy had degenerated from an aboriginal democracy of non-meddling farmers VI.

This Aristotle calls the middling regime: Thus it is attainable through reform of either an oligarchy or a democracy, the most prevalent constitutions among the Greeks. Strikingly, his example of such a regime is Sparta: It has been suggested in this article that the final clause of that sentence is important: Aristotelian citizenship counts as a noninstrumental good-in-itself only so long as it does indeed aim at the telos of a perfect life. That is, while Aristotle indeed valued the possibility of political participation in officeholding and the control of officeholding as part of the best constitution, he saw it as an intrinsic good only insofar as it was an expression of virtue, as it would be in that best constitution whether governed by a collectivity of virtuous citizens as in the regime described in Books VII and VIII, or in the rare and perhaps purely hypothetical case of a superlatively virtuous monarch.

Without virtue, political participation in officeholding and the control of officeholding was rather to be valued on the basis of expedience, though even then, membership in the political community of the polis remains essential to full human flourishing. Indeed, modern debates over the meaning of Aristotle find him a precursor of or inspiration for a range of intellectual and political positions: Aristotle as a communitarian MacIntyre vs.

Aristotle as an exponent of class conflict Yack ; Aristotle as a democrat, or at least as providing the basis for democracy Frank , vs. Aristotle in opposition to Athenian democracy in his day Ober One interesting development has been the use of Aristotle to articulate an ethics of capability Nussbaum Important developments in political thinking and practice took place under the Hellenistic kingdoms that supplanted Macedon in its suzerainty over the formerly independent Greek city-states.

These included, for example, a genre of rhetorical letters addressed to rulers, and the important analysis of Greek and Roman constitutional change by the second-century Greek historian Polybius Hahm As kingships flourished among the Hellenistic kingdoms until they in turn came under Roman rule, not only the value of political participation, but also the proper domains of politics, were widely debated.

Different authors would orient themselves respectively to still-surviving polis communities and the various leagues which united many of them in the Hellenistic period; to the kingdoms mentioned above; to the Roman constitution, and eventually to the special forms of imperial power which eventually arose therein; and in more philosophical terms, to the cosmos as a whole and all rational beings within it.

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In addition to the major movements of Epicureanism and Stoicism treated separately below, other schools also persisted and arose in this period. Those persisting included the Platonic Academy transformed in a skeptical direction and the Aristotelian Lyceum the Peripatetic School. Newcomers, albeit tracing themselves to their own understanding of the figure of Socrates, included the Cynics and the Pyrrhonist skeptics, and we focus on these latter two here. While this generally led them to advocate what might be considered more an anti-politics than a politics, a provocative statement by their founder Diogenes of Sinope c.

Yet the Cynics also manifested some parallels with the Epicureans and even with the skeptics. See the entry on Pyrrho. See the entry on ancient skepticism. Justice serves utility Alberti The greatest utility is that of tranquility or security, which is the naturally desired end or goal. While, as Annas For Epicureans, the city serves a legitimate and necessary function in ensuring security.

But this does not mean that an active public life is also normally the most rational path to security. On the contrary, while many people will be attracted to the possible fortune and glory of such a life, and while cities need such people, the Epicurean sage will on the whole refrain from active political participation for discussion of texts, including some exceptions, both in Lucretius and other evidence, see Fowler Instead the insecurities of life are best met by the formation of a community of friends living together and sharing their lives.

Friendships both secure us against risks and anxieties more reliably than the hazards of a political career and also provide pleasures and indeed joy: A potential sticking point for Epicurean ethics and politics is the justification for a still further dimension of communal life: Whatever the theoretical conundrum, it did not prevent a number of Epicureans from undertaking such risky public service, among them more than one of the assassins of Julius Caesar Sedley ; Fowler discusses a wide range of Roman Epicurean attitudes.

A more modest but still striking example of Epicurean public service is the huge portico inscribed with Epicurean sayings and exegesis in second-century Oenoanda in modern-day Turkey by one Diogenes of that city Smith , Whether or not his fellow citizens appreciated the instruction, modern archaeologists and philosophers are grateful for this unparalleled source of knowledge of Epicurean philosophy.

To be sure, the polity in question was invariably figured as a city, according to the account given in Dio Chrysostom Whether the members of this city were to be all humans together with the gods, or only human sages and the gods, and whether the city is to be envisaged as a distinct foundation or as identical with the cosmos, has much exercised both Stoic thinkers and subsequent interpreters.

How does or should the law of a particular city relate to the natural law? These questions are canvassed further as this section unfolds. Both Zeno and Chrysippus wrote works in the Platonic genre entitled Republic , neither of which survives in full. So too, reportedly, had Diogenes the Cynic. His portrait of the republic combines the Stoic idea of a natural law by which human conduct is harmonized with cosmic order, with a classical vision of politics in which a Platonic ideal of friendship through communist and sexual bonding more erotic than familial for Zeno persists following Schofield Humans share many characteristics and tendencies with other animals, and their initial impulse to form into society is a social rather than strictly political one: Yet, in keeping with some tendencies in Platonism and Cynicism, such law might have to be radically different from existing laws if it is to be in full conformity with nature and reason.

Especially for the early Stoics, existing cities remained an accepted arena both for political action in practice—Stoic sages and scholars advising kings and serving in offices SVF 3. Yet the role of natural law already in the early Stoics, and certainly in later ones, came to support an alternative horizon for politics on the scale of the cosmos as a whole Laurand Meanwhile, in the years of the Roman republic, certain affinities between Stoic and republican ideas proved significant, as we shall now see. Roman aristocrats were especially attracted to the Stoic willingness to countenance the kingly and political lives alongside the scholarly one as equally preferable SVF 3.

They began to study the Stoa seriously from the late second century BCE. The affinity between Stoicism and Roman republicanism was enhanced by the second-century Stoic teacher Panaetius, who seems to have argued that the Roman mos maiorum or ancient ways and customs were the best form of government, so burnishing philosophical principle with the ancestral piety dear to the Romans.

Other Romans were strongly attracted to Epicureanism or to Cynicism, and some of these, however paradoxically, likewise played significant roles in political life. Thus the distinctive lineaments of the Roman republic, now to be described, were debated and interpreted by the philosophically minded in terms of Greek political theory.

While the founders of the city of Rome were said to be the legendary twins Romulus and Remus, Romans would come to identify the origins of their distinctive liberty in the killing of a tyrannical king, generally dated in BCE, by the ancestor of the Junius Brutus who would eventually kill Julius Caesar. The position of king was replaced by two annually elected consuls, the royal council became the Senate, and popular assemblies were established to elect magistrates and pass the laws they proposed.

An influential account of Rome as such a mixed constitution, in this case combining the three classical regime forms of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, had already been given by the Greek historian Polybius, who referred to the distinction between the characteristic powers in each kind of regime and their mutual checking and balancing Histories 6. Whereas in Polybius the achievement of balance between the different powers was portrayed as resulting from mutual rivalrous self-assertion, Cicero would refer to it in more harmonious language, a form of balancing compensatio , De rep.

For a useful overview of Roman political thought, see J. According to Polybius, each element of the constitution exercised a distinctive form of power. The elected consuls wielded imperium , a form of executive command; the Senate enjoyed the power to deliberate and consent to specific policies; and the popular assemblies served as the source of authoritative law, also electing the magistrates, including the popular tribunes who in turn exercised veto powers over the Senate. An originally republican formula relating the consuls to the people as the source of authoritative law survives in a complete prescript of the Augustan period: The perennial Greek contest between oligarchs and democrats had been tamed in Rome to allow a recognized security of role for the Senate, a group drawn from no lower than the minor ranks of aristocracy and typically rewarding birth as well as the merit that had been gained and expressed in election to high political offices.

Yet the tumultuous personal quest for office and influence led many aristocrats to seek support among the people, sometimes with radical measures of land reform which Cicero, among others, would resolutely oppose.

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He rose to the office of consul and the lifetime Senatorial membership it subsequently conferred by his audacious wit as a lawyer and orator in public prosecutions. His greatest moment as consul in 63 BCE came in exposing a conspiracy by Catiline; the brutal suppression of the conspiracy by executing Roman citizens without trial, however, would tar his political legacy.

He became an enemy of Julius Caesar though accepting a pardon from him at the end of a stretch of civil wars in 47 BCE , seeing the assertion of power first by Caesar and then Marc Antony as fatal to the republic. Having defended in his De officiis the kind of tyrannicide that he took the killing of Caesar in 44 BCE to have constituted, and attacked Antony mercilessly in his series of fourteen Philippics the following year, Cicero was murdered in response by partisans of the then-ruling Triumvirate to which Antony belonged.

The writings of Cicero were virtually canonized subsequent to his death as classic models of rhetoric and philosophy; as Richard Tuck One was the Bible, and the other was the works of Cicero. While his philosophical writings—composed for the most part as a student of philosophy in Rome and Athens, and then in a brief period 46—44 BCE when political developments led him to retreat from active public life — cover a wide range of topics, including for example, among those especially relevant to politics are two works on the political role of the orator and the nature of oratory or rhetoric, celebrating the moral purposes of the orator as essential to the success of republican government.

While Cicero adhered to a moderate skepticism in general philosophical matters, he would draw on a number of Stoic ideas in formulating his own ethical and political teachings: In particular, Cicero emphasized the Stoic themes of the natural affinity for society and the existence of natural law. At the same time, Platonic themes and models were also important in his political writings. De re publica was composed by Cicero between 54 and 51 BCE, a turbulent period of strife in Roman politics. Its dramatic setting is in BCE during the crisis caused by Tiberius Gracchus, a consul who had championed a property redistribution law for the people and whom members of the Senate had violently suppressed as a putative threat to Roman civil order.

Framed as a dialogue between Scipio Aemilianus, a hero of the resistance against Tiberius Gracchus and his like-minded brother, and several others of his actual contemporaries, the dialogue has a discernible structure identified by E. It followed too that just as Plato denied the title of a single unified regime to the imperfect regimes torn by civil discord, so Cicero inferred that a corrupt regime was not strictly speaking a res publica at all III.

The role of the statesman rector rei publicae is to aim at the happiness of the citizens, defined in a laxer way than most Greek philosophers would allow, as wealth, true glory, and virtue all combined. In reply, the speech for justice avails itself of Stoic themes: This includes rule of the best over the weakest for the benefit of the latter III. The dream describes the divine order which not only rewards humans for just service to their city VI. What fame can you achieve in what men say, or what glory can you achieve that is worth seeking? In a dramatic rejection even of the traditional Roman motives of honor and glory as conventional motivations to virtue, the imagined elder statesman asks: Atkins has observed Probably begun after De re publica , it was likewise written in the years immediately before 51 BCE, and similarly survives only in piecemeal and fragmentary form.

Such iniquitous laws as those passed by tyrants are not just I. As these prescriptions, and the circumstances of their writing a temporary retreat from active politics , suggest, Cicero had a complex attitude to the Greek dilemma posing the lives of philosophy and of politics as opposed alternatives. He saw philosophy as a source of insight and perspective relevant to politics, but after his early studies, devoted himself to it primarily when temporarily debarred from more active pursuits.

One might say that philosophy became, beyond its intrinsic value, a form of alternative public service when the forum was too dangerous for him to enter here following the reflection along these lines offered by Baraz This dictum of A. Long holds true not only in the sense that for Cicero, as for Plato and Aristotle, ethics was inseparable from politics. Book I treats what is virtuous, or honestas ; Book II treats what is advantageous, or utilitas ; and Book III considers cases to show that any apparent conflict is illusory.

The most difficult case to resolve according to the overall argument of the book is that of advantage when understood as political ambition, driven by greatness of spirit. Similar casuistry enables Cicero to resolve in accordance with his thesis a range of common cases where advantage might be sought at the expense of justice in administering the estate of an orphan, for example, a common duty of eminent Romans. Yet such casuistry is always advanced within a context of celebration of justice and natural law: As in Plato, a redefinition of the virtues plays a crucial role in the overall argument for the benefits of justice.

For Cicero, the virtues are Romanized as officia , understood not only as duties in the abstract but rather as obligations of role or relationship, each attaching to someone in virtue of a distinct persona whether as father, consul, neighbor, and so on, or simply as a human being. Four principal virtues are identified: Strikingly, whereas tyrannicide might appear to be a difficult case for such an ethical code to confront, Cicero presents it — writing later in the year that Caesar was assassinated—as the straightforwardly ethically correct choice. Cicero couches his case in Stoic terms of naturalness and fellowship Dyck , ad loc.

His pivotal move is to deny that tyrants are party to the otherwise universal nature of human fellowship. In this period, Stoicism continued to exercise an important hold, drawing in part on the Hellenistic genre of advice to kings; Platonism too, and forms of Pythagoreanism, regained much sway. Moreover, a number of Stoic-minded writers and orators played their parts in Roman political life, some fashioning the life of a philosopher itself into a distinctive form of what might be called non-political politics Trapp