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    Alcmaeon was speaking of the human soul, not a world soul — Carmelics
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    Alcmaeon was speaking of the human soul, not a world soul

    Consciousness & Mind
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    1 reason for
    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.Aristotle's report on Alcmaeon's view of the soul is clearly about the human soul
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    • 2.The soul being discussed is said to be similar to the heavenly motions, and therefore must be distinct from them
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
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    • 1.Aristotle frequently projects his own hylomorphic categories onto predecessors, making his reports unreliable guides to original intent.
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    • 2.Pre-Socratic thinkers like Anaximenes and Heraclitus treated cosmic and psychic principles as continuous, not categorically distinct.
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    • 3.If Alcmaeon identified soul with self-motion, and the heavens are paradigmatically self-moving, the soul may participate in a common cosmic principle.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.The analogy between human soul and celestial motion in Aristotle's report is structurally identical to Plato's world-soul argument in the Timaeus.
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    • 2.Scholars including Vlastos have argued that early Pythagorean-adjacent thinkers, including Alcmaeon, used macrocosm-microcosm isomorphism as a foundational explanatory strategy.
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    • 3.An isomorphism between soul and heavenly motion is more parsimoniously explained by shared substance than by mere analogical resemblance.
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    Consciousness & Mind

    Related

    An isomorphism between soul and heavenly motion is more parsimoniously explained...Aristotle frequently projects his own hylomorphic categories onto predecessors, ...Aristotle's report on Alcmaeon's view of the soul is clearly about the human sou...If Alcmaeon identified soul with self-motion, and the heavens are paradigmatical...
    +4 moreShow less
    Pre-Socratic thinkers like Anaximenes and Heraclitus treated cosmic and psychic ...Scholars including Vlastos have argued that early Pythagorean-adjacent thinkers,...The analogy between human soul and celestial motion in Aristotle's report is str...The soul being discussed is said to be similar to the heavenly motions, and ther...

    Similar

    The human soul is derivative from and reflects the nature of the world...85%The soul is the form of the body, meaning a particular person's soul i...84%Aristotle's report on Alcmaeon's view of the soul is clearly about the...84%The human soul is a substance.82%

    Source

    AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid
    SEP: alcmaeon
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    Alcmaeon developed the first argument for the immortality of the soul, but the testimonia concerning it differ slightly from one another, and it appears to have been taken over and developed by Plato, so that it is very hard to determine exactly how to reconstruct Alcmaeon’s own argument. Barnes (1982, 116–120) and Hankinson (1998, 30–3) provide the most insightful analysis. Alcmaeon appears to have started from the assumption that the soul is always in motion. At one extreme we might suppose th
    Extraction notes

    Validity: Extracted via Max plan + API grounding/validity checks

    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (1 for, 2 against)
    Edits
    1 edit