The ancient Neoplatonic doctrine that the rational soul has one or more vehicles—bodies of a semi-material nature which it acquires during its descent through the spheres—plays a crucial part in Marsilio Ficino’s philosophical system, especially in his theory of sense-perception and in his account of the afterlife. Of the soul’s three vehicles, the one made of more or less rarefied air is particularly important, according to Ficino, during the soul’s embodied existence, for he identifies it with thespiritus, the pneumatic substance (...) based in the brain which was believed to serve as an instrument for perception and imagination. He refers to the vehicles in his arguments against the theory of the transmigration of souls into the bodies of animals, claiming that the imaginative suffering experienced after death by souls in their aerial bodies are much more acute than the physical pain they might feel in bodies made of flesh and blood. Since the power of the imagination, for Ficino, is stronger than that of the four senses, the soul’s perceptive activity is more intense after death, when it has lost its earthly body and lives instead in a body made of air. The vehicles, moreover, provided Ficino with evidence for the individual immortality of souls, a doctrine that he was attempting to demonstrate philosophically against the position of Averroes and his followers. In his view, the vehicles ensured the survival after death of two faculties which were intimately connected to personal identity: the imagination and memory. By pointing out the role of the vehicles in transporting the soul’s innermost representations and memories through the universe, Ficino was able to show that the distinguishing traits of our personality are not lost with bodily death, but survive along with the vehicle that carries them. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 10, Issue 1, pp 40 - 64 This paper focuses on the four preserved commentaries to a Pythagorean poem known as the _Golden Verses_. It deals with two Greek texts—Iamblichus’ _Protrepticus_ and Hierocles’ _Commentary to the Golden Verses_—as well as two commentaries preserved in Arabic, attributed to Iamblichus and Proclus. The article analyses how each of these commentators understood the relationship between man and god in the context of the eschatological vision presented in the poem. It also (...) demonstrates how differences in the interpretation of particular verses and ideas within the poem were dependent on an author’s philosophical views and cultural background. (shrink)

La notion d’un corps intermédiaire, connu sous le nom de véhicule de l’âme dans le néoplatonisme, est destinée à expliquer l’union de l’âme et du corps, mais aussi l’articulation du rationnel et de l’irrationnel, les communications avec le divin, et le maintien d’une forme de vie post mortem. Cette étude montre comment les premières attestations d’un usage structuré de la notion, sous la forme « le pneuma est le (premier) véhicule de l’âme », apparaissent dans deux contextes différents, fort éloignés (...) l’un de l’autre : une discussion de physiologie sur le pneuma optique, chez Galien ; et une explicitation philosophique de l’eschatologie d’Homère, dans le De Homero du Pseudo-Plutarque. Ce sont cependant les témoins les plus clairs d’une doctrine qui est encore en gestation dans le platonisme impérial. L’analyse montre en particulier ce que le médecin doit au Timée de Platon, ce que l’allégoriste doit à la théorie médicale des exhalaisons du sang, quand ils formulent cette nouvelle hypothèse commune sur la nature du pneuma, appuyée sur Platon et Aristote, et manifestement présentée comme une alternative à la doctrine stoïcienne de l’âme-pneuma. (shrink)