_ Source: _Volume 60, Issue 1, pp 3 - 39 This paper pursues a new approach to the problem of the relation between Alētheia and Doxa. It investigates as interrelated matters Parmenides’ impetus for developing and including Doxa, his conception of the mortal epistemic agent in relation both to Doxa’s investigations and to those in Alētheia, and the relation between mortal and divine in his poem. Parmenides, it is argued, maintained that Doxastic cognition is an ineluctable and even appropriate aspect (...) of mortal life. The mortal agent, however, is nonetheless capable of sustaining the cognition of Alētheia by momentarily coming to think with—or as—his divine soul. (shrink)

Este artículo se propone mostrar, en contra de las interpretaciones dominantes, que Platón debió tempranamente postular la supervivencia del alma como un sujeto independiente de daño y beneficio moral con el objeto de completar su defensa de la ética socrática – en particular el principio de Soberanía de la Virtud, central en diálogos tempranos como la Apología, el Critón y el Gorgias. Al dualismo metafísico que resulta de este postulado le denomino ‘dualismo socrático’, para diferenciarlo del dualismo maduro expuesto por (...) Platón en el Fedón. (shrink)

In this essay, I distinguish between the ancient tales relating to the dismemberment or sparagmos of Dionysos and the modern fabrication which I call the "Zagreus myth." This myth is put together from several elements: 1) the dismemberment of Dionysos; 2) the punishment of the Titans; 3) the creation of mankind from the Titans; and 4) the inheritance humans receive from the first three parts - the burden of guilt from the Titans' crime and the divine spark from the remains (...) of Dionysos. Building upon Linforth's critical review, I first examine the pieces of evidence out of which this Zagreus myth has been assembled, demonstrating that the few pieces of evidence used to construct the myth fail to support the existence of such a story before the modern era. While ancient sources provide testimony to the first three components of the myth, the final component-the resulting original sin-is an addition of modern scholars. I next show that, viewed without the framework of the Zagreus myth, the pieces of evidence provide testimony to a variety of tellings of the dismemberment myth, which was not the exclusive property of the "Orphics" but rather a well-known element in the Greek mythic tradition. I then explore the Christian models of religion within which the myth was mistakenly reconstructed, noting the role this reconstruction of Orphism played in the turn-of-the-century debates surrounding the nature of the early Church. Finally, I conclude that the gold tablets and their religious contexts have been misunderstood because these texts have been interpreted in terms of a modern fabrication dependent on Christian models, the Zagreus myth. The "Orphic" gold tablets themselves have nothing to do with the stories of sparagmos and anthropogony, but instead supply important evidence for the study of Greek eschatological beliefs. (shrink)

Granting that the `soul' was only an attractive and mysterious thought, from which philosophers rightly, but reluctantly, separated themselves - that which they have since learnt to put in its place is perhaps even more attractive and even more mysterious. The human body, in which the whole of the most distant and most recent past of all organic life once more becomes living and corporal, seems to flow through this past and right over it like a huge and inaudible torrent: (...) the body is a more wonderful thought than the old `soul'. (Nietzsche, 1973: 132-3) Man is but breath and a shadow. (Sophocles). (shrink)

Freud tracked the psyche along the paths of sleep, following the “royal road” of dreams. For the ancient Greeks, too, the psyche was revealed in sleep, not through the semiotics of dreams but through the peculiar state of being we occupy while asleep. As a “borderland between living and not living”, sleep offered unique access to the psukhē, that element within the self unassimilable to waking consciousness. This paper examines how Greek philosophers theorized the sleep state and the somnolent psukhē, (...) focusing on Heraclitus, Plato, and Aristotle. Each of the three attempts to reclaim sleep for waking life and to join the sleeping soul to the philosophical self. But that attempt never fully succeeds. Instead sleep consistently emerges as a philosophical blindspot, a state that—unlike dreams—cannot be spoken by philosophy's logos nor fully illuminated by philosophical analysis. (shrink)

Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus has traditionally been regarded as the poet's primary tragedy involving hero cult; this essay explores the more subtle but no less ritually explicit hero cult of the Aias first outlined by Burian. The passage, as Burian saw, occurs when the young Eurysakes kneels at his father's body and Teukros conducts an unusual combination of rites: supplication, curse, offering of hair, and magic . One crucial direction to the child, kai phulasse , however, is here not understood (...) to be a paradox of the suppliant who "protects" what he seizes but rather his physical attachment to the locus where he abides as well as his ritual dependence on the source of protection . By saying a curse and obtaining protection, Teukros and Eurysakes indicate how the still-warm body of the dead hero has already acquired special powers after death: specifically, the power to bestow both blessings and curses on mortals. The argument turns from the body to the tomb, the physical and lasting monument of hero cult, which the Sophoclean audience would know. The preceding scene ends with a pivotal choral passage where the hero's burial and cult are prescribed in highly Homeric terms . This passage forms an important link between the opposing views of the fate of the corpse and also between the hero's death and burial. This choral celebration of the hero's future status is cast in traditional Homeric language, but with some revealing inversions. One is the reversal of the verb whereby the earth "holds" or possesses heroes in Homer, while Aias occupies and possesses his tomb . The evolution of Homeric views of death is traced . In Sophocles' Aias the chorus performs the burial as a ritual act establishing a cult, long before it happens at the end of the play. The article concludes with a discussion of the historical cults of Aias known to the Athenians and of the more significant way that Aias becomes a hero: not self-consciously, as Oedipus did, but through rituals performed by his family and community. In the Aias, the poet's sense of hero cult lies closer to Homer and the epic tradition than it does, for instance, to Aeschylus. (shrink)

To figure out whether the main empirical question “Is our brain hardwired to believe in and produce God, or is our brain hardwired to perceive and experience God?” is answered, this paper presents systematic critical review of the positions, arguments and controversies of each side of the neuroscientific-theological debate and puts forward an integral view where the human is seen as a psycho-somatic entity consisting of the multiple levels and dimensions of human existence (physical, biological, psychological, and spiritual reality), allowing (...) consciousness/mind/spirit and brain/body/matter to be seen as different sides of the same phenomenon, neither reducible to each other. The emergence of a form of causation distinctive from physics where mental/conscious agency (a) is neither identical with nor reducible to brain processes and (b) does exert “downward” causal influence on brain plasticity and the various levels of brain functioning is discussed. This manuscript also discusses the role of cognitive processes in religious experience and outlines what can neuroscience offer for study of religious experience and what is the significance of this study for neuroscience, clinicians, theology and philosophy. A methodological shift from “explanation” to “description” of religious experience is suggested. This paper contributes to the ongoing discussion between theologians, cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists. (shrink)