Book contents
- Body and Soul in Hellenistic Philosophy
- Body and Soul in Hellenistic Philosophy
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Hellenistic Medicine, Strato of Lampsacus, and Aristotle’s Theory of Soul
- Chapter 2 Herophilus and Erasistratus on the Hēgemonikon
- Chapter 3 Galen on Soul, Mixture and Pneuma
- Chapter 4 The Partition of the Soul
- Chapter 5 Cosmic and Individual Soul in Early Stoicism
- Chapter 6 Soul, Pneuma, and Blood: The Stoic Conception of the Soul
- Chapter 7 The Platonic Soul, from the Early Academy to the First Century ce
- Chapter 8 Cicero on the Soul’s Sensation of Itself: Tusculans 1.49–76
- Bibliography
- Index Locorum
- Subject Index
Chapter 8 - Cicero on the Soul’s Sensation of Itself: Tusculans 1.49–76
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 May 2020
- Body and Soul in Hellenistic Philosophy
- Body and Soul in Hellenistic Philosophy
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Hellenistic Medicine, Strato of Lampsacus, and Aristotle’s Theory of Soul
- Chapter 2 Herophilus and Erasistratus on the Hēgemonikon
- Chapter 3 Galen on Soul, Mixture and Pneuma
- Chapter 4 The Partition of the Soul
- Chapter 5 Cosmic and Individual Soul in Early Stoicism
- Chapter 6 Soul, Pneuma, and Blood: The Stoic Conception of the Soul
- Chapter 7 The Platonic Soul, from the Early Academy to the First Century ce
- Chapter 8 Cicero on the Soul’s Sensation of Itself: Tusculans 1.49–76
- Bibliography
- Index Locorum
- Subject Index
Summary
In the first book of his Tusculans, Cicero gives two arguments that the soul is eternal. Specifically, he concludes that each human soul’s rational part or ‘mind’ (mens) neither came to be nor will perish. I shall argue that in pursuit of this conclusion, Cicero constructs the position that, at least in this life, the human mind does not ‘sense’ itself, but knows about itself only by inference from its ‘sensations’ of other objects. First, the question of the mind’s sensation of itself is comparable to current debates about consciousness, for example to questions relating to the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness. To put it crudely, the ‘hard problem’ is that we suppose that our minds are conscious of themselves immediately, and that what we seem to learn from this immediate self-consciousness is that our minds are so different from the natural world we observe through the senses that it is a puzzle to understand how the two could be as intimately related as they appear to be.
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- Body and Soul in Hellenistic Philosophy , pp. 199 - 230Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020
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