Amour et santé dans le Banquet de Platon : la notion d’harmonie

Elenchos ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Lucia Saudelli

AbstractThe structure as well as the themes of the Symposium suggest that Eryximachus’ speech plays a fundamental role in the dialogue. The problem is that what he says in praise of love is far from clear and continues to be a subject of debate. The aim of our article is to re-examine this speech to clarify its meaning and determine its contribution to Plato’s theory of love. First, we will analyse the text of the Symposium, then we will investigate its medical back-ground, and finally we will evaluate its philosophical impact. We will argue that Eryximachus’ speech, which draws inspiration from the Hippocratic Collection and the Pre-Socratic thought, is based on the concept of ‘harmony’: a balanced and organised unity of opposites. According to Eryximachus, love – conceived of as harmony – is the key to the health and the virtue of human beings, as well as to the cosmic order and justice. Thereby the specificity of Eryximachus’ speech will become clear: Plato tries to combine science and morality by proposing, among other things, some considerations on bioethics.

Author(s):  
Vincent G. Potter

In recent years, Charles Sanders Peirce has emerged as one of America's major philosophical thinkers. His work has invited philosophical reflection about those basic issues that inevitably confront us as human beings, especially in an age of science. Peirce's concern for experience, for what is actually encountered, means that his philosophy forms a reflective commentary on actual life and on the world in which it is lived. This book argues that Peirce's doctrine of the normative sciences is essential to his pragmatism. No part of Peirce's philosophy is bolder than his attempt to establish esthetics, ethics, and logic as the three normative sciences and to argue for the priority of esthetics among the trio. The book shows that Pierce took seriously the trinity of normative sciences and demonstrates that these categories apply both to the conduct of man and to the workings of the cosmos. It combines sympathetic and informed exposition with straightforward criticism and deals with the gaps and inconsistencies in Peirce's thought. It shows that Peirce was above all a cosmological and ontological thinker, one who combined science both as a method and as result with a conception of reasonable actions to form a comprehensive theory of reality. Peirce's pragmatism, is not a glorification of action but rather a theory of the dynamic nature of things in which the “ideal” dimension of reality has genuine power for directing the cosmic order, including man, toward reasonable goals.


2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 126-143
Author(s):  
Caitlin Mahaffy

In early modern England, people believed in the music of the spheres, the notion that the foundations of cosmic order were a result of musical principles. The importance of music in early modern English society encouraged Renaissance thinkers to hear music in a variety of places, even within the noises of animals. I argue that numerous early modern literary texts, including works by Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Milton, indicate that animals are capable of hearing celestial music and that they are imitating the heavenly music through their own musical performance. Animals' imitation of celestial music raises the following questions: Could animal-created music be a kind of divine language? Do animals' natural musical capabilities indicate that they are more connected to the divine than human beings are? Such questions matter because animals were seen as expendable in early modern England and, therefore, this view of animals as possibly closer to the divine than human beings problematizes the widely held early modern belief that men are superior to beasts. This article contributes to the rapidly growing field of early modern animal studies by creating a connection between Renaissance views of animals and the conceptual basis for environmental stewardship in our own time.


Elenchos ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-296
Author(s):  
Federico Casella

Abstract The presence of a theory of the transmigration of the soul or, according to Empedocles’ words, of the δαίμων is a controversial issue among scholars. A major difficulty arises when one tries to read the fragments of the Purifications – where this theme is particularly recurrent – in conjunction with those usually attributed to the poem On nature. The aim of this paper is to suggest a ‘method’ to analyse the extant fragments, and to offer a possible interpretation of the nature of the so–called cycle of the δαίμων. On the one hand, I shall try to show that the two poems, if read together, can provide a ‘salvific’ message. As a matter of fact, the description of the cosmic order that emerges from the poem On nature might convey the same prescription as stated in the Purifications for following the universal laws, which would ultimately allow human beings to be happy even in an age of universal evil. On the other hand, I shall propose to identify the δαίμων with the roots, which can escape from the cycle – i.e. become happy – when they are shaped as human minds, thanks to the way in which the processes of knowledge work.


2020 ◽  
Vol 21-22 (1) ◽  
pp. 327-342
Author(s):  
Warren Huard

AbstractMost of Herakles’ accomplishments as portrayed in Hesiod’s Theogony concern his defeat of various monstrous entities, such as the Nemean lion. By overcoming this “bane to human beings” (πῆμ’ ἀνθρώποις, line 329) and other creatures like it, Herakles does more than make the world safer for human habitation. Significantly, many of these creatures are among the offspring of Echidna and Typhaon/Typhoeus. Zeus must defeat this Typhoeus in order to establish his dominion over the cosmos. It falls to Zeus’ son Herakles to uphold Zeus’ new cosmic order by overcoming the offspring of Typhaon remaining among mortals. Herakles’ role within the Theogony is thus coherent in its cosmogonic dimensions, with Herakles acting both on behalf of Zeus’ order and in opposition to the would-be order of Typhaon/Typhoeus and (perhaps) a Hera not yet aligned with Zeus. Furthermore, through his actions among mortals, Herakles effectively brings this grand cosmogonic conflict down to earth, which serves narratively to better ground the events of the Theogony in the lives of Hesiod’s hearers and readers.


1954 ◽  
Vol 27 (5) ◽  
pp. 565-577 ◽  
Author(s):  
John F. Scholer ◽  
Charles F. Code

1949 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 970-977 ◽  
Author(s):  
John M. McMahon ◽  
Charles F. Code ◽  
Willtam G. Saver ◽  
J. Arnold Bargen
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
Charles A. Doan ◽  
Ronaldo Vigo

Abstract. Several empirical investigations have explored whether observers prefer to sort sets of multidimensional stimuli into groups by employing one-dimensional or family-resemblance strategies. Although one-dimensional sorting strategies have been the prevalent finding for these unsupervised classification paradigms, several researchers have provided evidence that the choice of strategy may depend on the particular demands of the task. To account for this disparity, we propose that observers extract relational patterns from stimulus sets that facilitate the development of optimal classification strategies for relegating category membership. We conducted a novel constrained categorization experiment to empirically test this hypothesis by instructing participants to either add or remove objects from presented categorical stimuli. We employed generalized representational information theory (GRIT; Vigo, 2011b , 2013a , 2014 ) and its associated formal models to predict and explain how human beings chose to modify these categorical stimuli. Additionally, we compared model performance to predictions made by a leading prototypicality measure in the literature.


2015 ◽  
Vol 223 (3) ◽  
pp. 151-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nina Schweinfurth ◽  
Undine E. Lang

Abstract. In the development of new psychiatric drugs and the exploration of their efficacy, behavioral testing in mice has always shown to be an inevitable procedure. By studying the behavior of mice, diverse pathophysiological processes leading to depression, anxiety, and sickness behavior have been revealed. Moreover, laboratory research in animals increased at least the knowledge about the involvement of a multitude of genes in anxiety and depression. However, multiple new possibilities to study human behavior have been developed recently and improved and enable a direct acquisition of human epigenetic, imaging, and neurotransmission data on psychiatric pathologies. In human beings, the high influence of environmental and resilience factors gained scientific importance during the last years as the search for key genes in the development of affective and anxiety disorders has not been successful. However, environmental influences in human beings themselves might be better understood and controllable than in mice, where environmental influences might be as complex and subtle. The increasing possibilities in clinical research and the knowledge about the complexity of environmental influences and interferences in animal trials, which had been underestimated yet, question more and more to what extent findings from laboratory animal research translate to human conditions. However, new developments in behavioral testing of mice involve the animals’ welfare and show that housing conditions of laboratory mice can be markedly improved without affecting the standardization of results.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document