Chrysippus's Treatise
Type de matériel :
65
Chrysippus’On the soul is a lost work, from which wide extracts are preserved by Galen. Through an attempt to draw a map of the treatise, one can try to understand in what sense the soul was, according to the Stoics, a question of physics. The treatise was composed of two books. The first half of book I was dedicated to the substance of the soul, as “breath” (hence as a body): this part presumably included demonstrations reported by Alexander of Aphrodisias and some other ancient sources. The second part tried to demonstrate the location of the ruling part of the soul in the heart: Chrysippus considered that there was no empirical evidence on this issue, and used a whole series of various arguments reported by Galen. Book II was presumably dedicated to a physiology of the parts of the soul (voice, semen and the five senses). This implies that the treatise did not examine either the faculties of the soul or the passions. In other words, the treatise was not about psychology, but about physiology of soul: in that respect, the question of soul entirely belonged to “physics.”
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