Volume 87, Issue 3

In this paper I re-examine the status of the mind-body relation in several of Plato’s late dialogues. A range of views has been attributed to Plato here. For example, it has been thought that Plato is a substance dualist, for whom the mind can exist independently of the body; or an attribute dualist, who has left behind the strong dualistic commitments of the Phaedo by allowing that the mind may be the subject of spatial movements. But even in cases where a classification of Plato as a holder of a particular ontology of the mind has been left undefined, it has been a shared assumption that in the late dialogues the mind itself must be immaterial. I take issue with these various views and show that none of them is necessitated by the text. In the first place, I argue there is strong evidence against the view that Plato should, in his late period, be committed not only to substance dualism, but also to attribute dualism. Furthermore, it is possible that Plato may have allowed that the mind itself be a three-dimensional corporeal entity (in a way that sets up a precedent for later Stoic developments). But even if this is not the only possible reading of the text, it is shown how at any rate the mind must be seen in late Plato as the principle of organization of a body and ontologically inseparable from it. Despite prima facie affinities with Aristotle here, we shall see a Plato emerge for whom the mind (without exception) and the body cannot exist without one another – a thesis more radical than that of Aristotle’s. To bring out the provocative nature of this suggestion, I start, in section I, by laying out the state of the question and compare what I shall argue is the late Platonic view with standard interpretations of his previous work, stressing the historical force that I expect this thesis to have. Afterwards, in three respective sections, I proceed to pay heed to relevant passages in the Timaeus , Philebus and Laws in order to establish the main point of this paper. Finally, in section V, I consider the challenge apparently introduced against my thesis by Plato’s occasional talk of immortality and eschatology in those dialogues, and argue instead that many of those passages add further strength to the view defended in this essay.

Kant’s position on teleology and biology is neither inconsistent nor obsolete; his arguments have some surprising and enduring philosophical strengths. But Kant’s account will appear weak if we muddy the waters by reading him as aiming to defend teleology by appealing to considerations popular in contemporary philosophy. Kant argues for very different conclusions: we can neither know teleological judgments of living beings to be true, nor legitimately explain living beings in teleological terms; such teleological judgment is justified only as a “problematic” guideline in our search for mechanistic explanations. These conclusions are well supported by Kant’s defense of his demanding analysis, according to which teleological judgment literally applies to a complex whole only where teleology truly explains the presence of its parts.

Descartes’ account of emotion conflict in the Passions of the Soul has recently been the subject of Shapiro’s essay (2003), who claims that agent evaluation of the human good operates as an explanatory factor for the reformation of existing mind-body associations. On the contrary, it is here argued that this passion reformation involves explicit reasoning processes, and that the tendency to promote the good of the human being either denotes the cause and not the reason for the original passion formation or is a specific reasoning method. Passion reformation does not seem to be essentially related to the problem of mind-body union.

KLOTZ, CHRISTIAN: Selbstbewußtsein und praktische Identität. Eine Untersuchung über Fichtes Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo (Katja Crone) STOKHOF, MARTIN: World and Life as One. Ethics and Ontology in Wittgenstein’s Early Thought (Brian Armstrong / Edgar Morscher) HUTTER, AXEL: Das Interesse der Vernunft. Kants ursprüngliche Einsicht und ihre Entfaltung in den transzendentalphilosophischen Hauptwerken (Heiner F. Klemme) HENRICH, DIETER: Grundlegung aus dem Ich. Untersuchungen zur Vorgeschichte des Idealismus Tübingen – Jena (1790–1794) (Gunnar Hindrichs)