Translating Renaissance Neoplatonic panpsychism into seventeenth-century corpuscularism: the case of Sir Kenelm Digby (1603–1665)
Intellectual History Review December 14, 2023 Sergius Kodera
Kenelm Digby was an early English advocate of Cartesianism, but his approach to the mind-body problem was conciliatory. In his 1644 work Two Treatises, he argued that physical bodies follow corpuscular philosophy, while human intellectual capacities cannot be explained by matter alone. This article examines Digby's little-noticed relationship with Renaissance Neoplatonic doctrines of spirits—entities that are half spirit and half matter, mediating between body and soul. The author suggests that Digby preserved the traditional ideas of a universal spirit and world soul, translating Marsilio Ficino's spiritus doctrines into the language of seventeenth-century corpuscularism rather than overcoming them.