On Monday, November 13, at 5:15 pm, in 214 O'Shaughnessy, Jonathan Greig (KU Leuven, Belgium) will deliver a talk on:
"Soul-Body Relation in Maximus the Confessor and its Roots in Aristotle, the Commentators, and Early Byzantines” (for the abstract, see below).
This event is a collaboration between Workshop on Ancient Philosophy and the History of Philosophy Forum.
Abstract: In Ambiguum 7.40-42 (Constas), Maximus the Confessor, responding to the Origenist claim of the soul’s pre-existence, establishes a definition of the human soul as a “part” of the whole form of man, such that the soul cannot be conceived without its corresponding other “part” of the body, and vice versa. At face value this is perplexing: how can the soul be part of a whole, yet maintain its existence after the body’s death? Furthermore, Maximus defines the soul as having its own ousia in contradistinction to the body having its own ousia. But this would seem to contrast with his own account of the soul and body as “parts” of one form, which seems like the true ousia of the particular human: how can the substance/ousia of man imply two separate ousiai?
In this paper I will discuss Maximus’ definition in some detail and make some initial connections to both Platonist, Aristotelian, and earlier Patristic accounts of the soul that Maximus may be drawing on, while attempting his own, unique solution to the question of the soul-body relation in the case of humans.
Originally published at historyofphilosophy.nd.edu.