Abstract
The purpose of this book is to examine the nexus between the corporeal, emotional, spiritual and intellectual aspects of human life as represented in the writing of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance over two thousand years of Western thought, from Plato in the fifth century BC and the fourth century AD Byzantine dialogues on the soul, to the philosophical and medical writings of the early 1700s.
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Notes
- 1.
“So between joy and anguish [the soul] is distraught… perplexed and frenzied; with madness upon [it], [it] can neither sleep by night nor keep still by day, but runs hither and thither, yearning for [the beloved] in whom beauty dwells. (Phaedrus 251d)”.
- 2.
Shakespeare (1997), Cymbeline, King of Britain, 2963.
- 3.
I am grateful to Simon Haines for pointing this out in our conversations long ago.
- 4.
John Milton in building the characters of Adam and Eve in The Paradise Lost: Milton’s Adam and Eve show unselfconscious sexuality and desire to have children before the Fall (Book 9, pp. 205–207), and damaging desire after the Fall (Book 9, pp. 1020–1060); and Adam’s fall is represented as his choice of Eve before God—and, fascinatingly for a writer who was a Puritan, presented as an act of free will. The moment of the Fall, the actual tasting of the fruit of knowledge, does not come until line 999, much later in the same Book:
How can I live without thee, how forgo
Thy sweet converse and love so dearly joined,
To live again in these wild woods forlorn?
Should God create another Eve, and I
Another rib afford, yet loss of thee
Would never from my heart; no, no, I feel
The link of nature draw me: flesh of flesh,
Bone of my bone thou art, and from thy state,
Mine never shall be parted, bliss or woe.
(Milton 2006, Paradise lost, Book 9, pp. 907–916).
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Kambaskovic, D. (2014). Introduction. In: Kambaskovic, D. (eds) Conjunctions of Mind, Soul and Body from Plato to the Enlightenment. Studies in the History of Philosophy of Mind, vol 15. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9072-7_1
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