Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy

The Pythagorean conception of the soul from Pythagoras to Philolaus 33
to account for the production of seed or for growth; fragment 13 shows
that the faculties located in the genitals and the navel account for these.
A further question arises. Is the transmigrating soul, i. e. the command
center in the heart, material or immaterial? In the Phaedo, Plato
is clearly pushing towards an immaterial conception of the soul, but
the Pythagoreans, Aristotle tells us (Metaph. 990a4), do not make Plato’s
distinction between the sensible and the intelligible. Nothing in the evidence
we have considered for Philolaus suggests that he thought of the
psychÞ as immaterial. Perhaps Aristotle’s comment that for the Pythagoreans
soul was either the motes we see in the air or what moves them
suggests that Philolaus thought that the soul was made of some very
fine material and that there are souls around us all the time, which
are available to enter appropriate bodies and govern the process of
their becoming ensouled. In adopting a materialistic account of the
soul, Philolaus would be following Presocratic orthodoxy. His predecessor
Heraclitus gave a materialistic account of the soul as did his slightly
younger contemporary Democritus; Empedocles explained the psychic
faculties of living bodies in material terms and may have regarded the
transmigrating daimôn as a stable compound of the elements, although
this is controversial. 33 Plato’s arguments in the Phaedo are directed
against a soul that is thought of as the harmony of the physical elements
33 Most scholars agree that Heraclitus’ soul is material. The traditional view has
been that it is fire (e.g. Schofield 1991) but Kahn has argued that it is a form
of air (1979, 245 – 254). According to Aristotle, Democritus thought the soul
was composed of round atoms similar to those of fire, which he likened to
the motes in a sunbeam (de An. 404a1 – 3). Aristotle assigns this same comparison
with the motes in the sunbeam to unnamed Pythagoreans a little later
(404a17). There are other similarities between the psychology of Philolaus
and that of Democritus. Thus, Philolaus makes a clear distinction between sensation
and thought as Democritus does (fr. 125). Kahn has cast doubt on the authenticity
of fragment 13 of Philolaus because it shows even greater terminological
precision than is found in Democritus (1985, 20 n. 45). I have already
responded to these doubts (Huffman 1993, 311). In Empedocles, the psychic
faculties of the living body are explained solely in material terms (Long
1966); thought is the blood around the heart (fr. 105). The nature of Empedocles’
transmigrating daimones is controversial. Long argues that they are incorporeal
and that Empedocles never made clear how or if they are related to four
elements, love and strife (1966: 274 –276); those who want to reconcile Empedocles’
views on physics with this religious views have often thought of the
daimones as bits of love (O’Brien 1969, 325 –336) or related to love in some way
(Kahn 1993). For Empedocles’ daimôn as a stable compound of the elements see
Inwood 2001, 59 – 62.