Soul and the Self
Posted on 17 July 2011
Peter tackles the De Anima (“On the Soul”), focusing on the definition of soul as the form of the body and Aristotle’s theory of sensation.
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Posted on 1 April 2012
Leading Hellenistic philosophy scholar Tony Long talks to Peter about the self, ethics and politics in the Stoics, Epicureans and Skeptics.
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Posted on 6 May 2012
We put the Philo in philosophy this week, as Philo of Alexandria reads the Bible through the lens of Middle Platonism.
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Posted on 13 May 2012
Plutarch, a major figure of early Imperial literature, was also a Platonist philosopher. He gives us insight into Platonism before Plotinus, and also the letter E.
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Posted on 15 July 2012
For Plotinus, Soul is on the border between the physical and intelligible realms. Can he convince us to identify ourselves with its highest part?
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Posted on 18 November 2012
Origen, greatest of the Greek Church Fathers, sets out a stunning theory of human redemption as he marries philosophical rigor to theological speculation.
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Posted on 30 December 2012
The Latin church fathers Tertullian, Lactantius, Jerome, and Ambrose discuss soul, ethics, and the dangers of Hellenic philosophy.
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Posted on 6 January 2013
Augustine’s life story is related in the Confessions, a work that combines autobiography, theology, and metaphysical discussions of the nature of time.
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Posted on 10 February 2013
Augustine explores the nature of the human mind in order to establish its similarity to, and dissimilarity from, the divine Trinity.
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Posted on 7 April 2013
Al-Kindī uses Hellenic materials to discuss the eternity of the world, divine attributes, and the nature of the soul.
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Posted on 15 September 2013
With his Flying Man argument, Avicenna explores self-awareness and the relation between soul and body.
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Posted on 20 April 2014
Abū l-Barakāt al-Baghdādī makes up his own mind about physics and the soul, and along the way inaugurates a new style of doing philosophy.
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Posted on 4 May 2014
Suhrawardī, founder of the Illuminationist (ishrāqī) tradition, proposes a metaphysics of light on the basis of his theory of knowledge by presence.
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Posted on 11 May 2014
The Illuminationists carry on Suhrawardī’s critique of “Peripatetic” philosophy and wonder if they will be reborn as giraffes.
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Posted on 7 June 2015
John Blund and William of Auvergne draw on Aristotle and Avicenna to argue that the soul is immaterial and immortal.
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Posted on 26 July 2015
Peter Olivi proposes that awareness occurs not through passively being affected by things, but by actively paying attention to them.
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Posted on 11 October 2015
Robert Kilwardby is infamous for his ban on teaching certain philosophical ideas at Oxford, yet made contributions in logic and on the soul.
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Posted on 1 November 2015
The ancient texts known as the Upaniṣads claim to expose the hidden connections between things, including the self and the world.
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Posted on 15 November 2015
The god Indra seeks to learn the nature of his own self from another god, Prajāpati, and receives an answer worth waiting for.
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Posted on 6 December 2015
Therese Cory tells Peter what 13th century philosophers thought about self-awareness.
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Posted on 3 January 2016
Thomas Aquinas makes controversial claims concerning the unity of the soul and the empirical basis of human knowledge.
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Posted on 21 February 2016
Peter speaks to Rupert Gethin about the no-self theory, and its implications for Buddhist ethics and meditation practices.
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Posted on 24 July 2016
The founding text of the Vedānta school, the Vedānta- or Brahma-Sūtra, interprets the Upaniṣads as teaching that all things derive from brahman.
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Posted on 4 September 2016
Śaṅkara and his “non-dual” (Advaita) Vedānta, which teaches that only brahman is real, and the world of experience and individual self are mere illusion.
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Posted on 16 October 2016
The oldest treatise of Sāṃkhya enumerates the principles of the cosmos and of the human mind.
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Posted on 13 November 2016
Yoga as presented by Patañjali offers a practical complement to the Sāṃkhya theory of the cosmos and the self.
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Posted on 27 November 2016
A leading expert on the founding text of Yoga tells us why, when, and by whom it was written, and what it has to do with modern day yoga practice.
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Posted on 22 January 2017
Nyāya proposes that each of us has both a self and a mind, in addition to the body.
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Posted on 30 April 2017
Monima Chadha takes Peter through Buddhist-Hindu debates over mind and self.
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Posted on 6 August 2017
The Jain theory of standpoints or non-onesidedness (anekāntavāda) makes truth a matter of perspective.
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Posted on 15 October 2017
Vasubandhu’s path to Yogācāra Buddhism, a form of idealism which holds that nothing can be mind-independent.
1 comments
Posted on 3 December 2017
Martin Pickavé returns to the podcast to talk about theories of the emotions in Aquinas, Scotus and Wodeham.
7 comments
Posted on 10 December 2017
Dignāga argues that all perception is accompanied by self-awareness.
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Posted on 24 December 2017
Buddhaghosa, a major figure in the history of Buddhism in Sri Lanka, argues against the need for a self to control and coordinate mental activities.
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Posted on 22 April 2018
Three guests to celebrate 300 episodes! Rachel Barney, Christof Rapp, and Mark Kalderon join Peter to discuss the importance of ancient philosophy for today's philosophers.
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Posted on 6 May 2018
Peter King, Catarina Dutilh Novaes, and Russ Friedman discuss their approaches to medieval philosophy and its contemporary relevance.
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Posted on 10 June 2018
Demands for ma’at (justice or truth) and a confrontation with the soul, in the Tale of the Eloquent Peasant and Dispute Between a Man and his Ba.
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Posted on 16 September 2018
Teodros Kiros discusses his work in political philosophy and the history of Ethiopian philosophical thought.
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Posted on 6 January 2019
Traditional African ideas about personhood, which challenge assumptions about the relation between mind and body, self and other.
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Posted on 20 January 2019
Emphasis on the value of community as a major theme in African philosophy.
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Posted on 9 June 2019
Anton Wilhelm Amo, brought to Germany from his native Ghana, defends a rigorous dualism of mind and body. Was this philosophy connected to his African origins?
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Posted on 8 September 2019
Lorenzo Valla launches a furious attack on scholastic philosophy, favoring the resources of classical Latin.
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Posted on 3 November 2019
An interview with Sabrina Ebbersmeyer about the relation of emotion to reason and the body, and panpsychism, in the Renaissance.
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Posted on 12 January 2020
Marsilio Ficino’s revival of Platonism, with a focus on his proofs for the soul’s immortality in his magnum opus, the Platonic Theology.
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Posted on 22 March 2020
Pico della Mirandola and Giannozzo Manetti praise humans as the centerpiece of the created world. But what about the other animals?
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Posted on 5 April 2020
An interview with Cecilia Muratori, an expert on the surprisingly modern ideas about non-human animals that emerged in the Renaissance.
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Posted on 25 October 2020
Pietro Pomponazzi and Agostino Nifo debate the immortality of the soul and the cogency of Averroes’ theory of intellect.
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Posted on 3 January 2021
The polymath Girolamo Cardano explores medicine, mathematics, philosophy of mind, and the interpretation of dreams.
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Posted on 31 January 2021
Was the anti-Aristotelian natural philosophy of Bernardino Telesio and Tommaso Campanella the first modern physical theory?
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Posted on 18 July 2021
Trends in Aristotelian philosophy in northern and eastern Europe in the fifteenth century, featuring discussion of the “Wegestreit” and the nominalist theology of Gabriel Biel.
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Posted on 15 January 2023
In his Essays Montaigne uses wit, insight, and humanist training to tackle his favorite subject: Montaigne.
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Posted on 26 February 2023
Marie le Jars de Gourney, the “adoptive daughter” of Montaigne, lays claim to his legacy and argues for the equality of the sexes.
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Posted on 13 March 2011
In the Phaedo, Plato depicts the death of Socrates, and argues for two of his most distinctive doctrines: the immortality of the soul and the theory of Forms.
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