Pub Date : 2021-07-22DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190913441.003.0007
Jeremy Brown
Brown interrogates the status of the world soul in medieval and early modern Kabbalah. He advances a critical distinction between stronger and weaker fields for determining this inquiry, namely, between (a) the kabbalists’ explicit uses of the Platonic term “world soul,” which are rare and begin primarily during the sixteenth century, and (b) Kabbalah’s hypostatic psychology. The latter dates back to the infancy of Kabbalah in the thirteenth century. While sharing affinities with Neoplatonic cosmo-psychology, it does adopt its technical terminology. Special attention focuses on attempts during the Renaissance to render the teachings of Isaac Luria into the philosophical idiom of the world soul, and in particular, a nexus of Lurianic speculation that related the distillation of the primordial ether from the abyssal depth, or ʾEn Sof. Conclusion explores the dynamics of Kabbalah’s uneasy relationship with this facet of the Platonic philosophical heritage.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-22DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190913441.003.0004
L. Taub
The Greek word harmonia refers to “joining,” “fastening,” “attunement,” and “agreement.” While various authors used the term, Pythagoreans are credited with giving it special meaning, in the context of mathematics and music. Pythagoras (born mid-sixth century BCE) and his followers were known for their view that numbers underlie the composition and structure of the entire world....
{"title":"Reflection I","authors":"L. Taub","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190913441.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190913441.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"The Greek word harmonia refers to “joining,” “fastening,” “attunement,” and “agreement.” While various authors used the term, Pythagoreans are credited with giving it special meaning, in the context of mathematics and music. Pythagoras (born mid-sixth century BCE) and his followers were known for their view that numbers underlie the composition and structure of the entire world....","PeriodicalId":170682,"journal":{"name":"World Soul","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131614822","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-22DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190913441.003.0009
Gideon Manning, James Wilberding
Explaining the generation of any living thing involves answering any number of difficult questions. Historically, two very prominent questions have been how to account for the life or vitality of the new living thing, and how to account for the specific features that make the new living thing into the ...
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Pub Date : 2021-07-22DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190913441.003.0013
Brady Bowman
Post-Kantian philosophers historicize the world soul, reconceiving it as an implicitly rational, progressive, yet impersonal agency, at work throughout nature as a formative principle, more especially, however, in the progressive liberation and self-determination of spirit in human history. This chapter outlines the concept’s career in the thought of Kant, Maimon, Schelling, and Hegel, focusing especially on the overlapping functions they accord to the world soul. On the one side, it serves to mediate within nature between the opposing spheres of mechanism and organic life; on the other, between those of unconscious currents of historical development and self-consciously free human action. In thus tasking the world soul with mediating between nature and the history of human freedom, German idealists are faithful to their Platonic source of inspiration, even as they refashion the concept in a distinctively modern, post-Enlightenment spirit.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-22DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190913441.003.0017
V. Allori
Quantum mechanics is a groundbreaking theory: it not only is extraordinarily empirically adequate but also is claimed to having shattered the classical paradigm of understanding the observer-observed distinction as well as the part-whole relation. This, together with other quantum features, has been taken to suggest that quantum theory can help one understand the mind-body relation in a unique way, in particular to solve the hard problem of consciousness along the lines of panpsychism. In this chapter, after having briefly presented panpsychism, Valia Allori discusses the main features of quantum theories and the way in which the main quantum theories of consciousness use them to account for conscious experience.
{"title":"Contemporary Echoes of the World Soul","authors":"V. Allori","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190913441.003.0017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190913441.003.0017","url":null,"abstract":"Quantum mechanics is a groundbreaking theory: it not only is extraordinarily empirically adequate but also is claimed to having shattered the classical paradigm of understanding the observer-observed distinction as well as the part-whole relation. This, together with other quantum features, has been taken to suggest that quantum theory can help one understand the mind-body relation in a unique way, in particular to solve the hard problem of consciousness along the lines of panpsychism. In this chapter, after having briefly presented panpsychism, Valia Allori discusses the main features of quantum theories and the way in which the main quantum theories of consciousness use them to account for conscious experience.","PeriodicalId":170682,"journal":{"name":"World Soul","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130226158","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 1900-01-01DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190913441.003.0010
A. Peterman
The world soul was often a target of attack in early modern natural philosophy, on grounds of impiety and explanatory vacuity. But it also played an important role in debates about two of the most important questions in natural philosophy: How does nature depend on God, and what explains nature’s organization? As an answer to those questions, it lived on through the early modern period, sustained especially by philosophers who argued that individuals in nature cannot be understood in isolation from the whole. In this chapter it is argued that in this guise, it served as an alternative model of explanation in a context that increasingly emphasized explanation in terms of laws of nature, and that this reflects the fact that these two models represent two fundamentally competing approaches to natural philosophical explanation.
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