Transmigrating Soul Between the Presocratics and Plato

Abstract

The article discusses the nature of transmigrating soul in the early Greek thought, most notably in the thought of Empedocles and Philolaus. It argues that, in general, soul was conceived as a kind of subtle ‘matter’. The turning point Plato who strive to guarantee soul’s immortality by connecting it with transcendent, but also immaterial Forms. This accentuates the intellectual character of soul, and this holds also in eschatological context, but at the same time transforms the categories in which we tend to think about it until today. * This is an expanded and revised version of an article originally published in Czech as Hladký 2010. I would like to thank Eliška Fulínová, Jean-Claude Picot, Richard Seaford, Jiří Stránský, and Tomáš Vítek for their invaluable comments and suggestions. This work has been supported by Charles University Research Centre program No. 204056. For the Greek text of Empedocles and Philolaus, we use chiefly the classical edition by Diels and Kranz 1951–1952, from which, however, we often diverge and use Wright 1995 and Huffman 1993. On the subject of early Greek notion of the soul in general, one can recommend the following sources with further references: Rohde 1925, Furley 1956, Claus 1981, Bremmer 1983, 2002, 2010, Albinus 2000, and Lorenz 2009. The subject of transmigration and afterlife in particular is treated in Long 1948, Burkert 1995, and Drozdek 2011.