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Intellectual History Review

ISSN 1749-6977

6 papers in the library · publishing 2023-2024

Papers

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Patrizi, panpsychism, and the Presocratics

Intellectual History Review January 2, 2024 Vojtěch Hladký

ABSTRACT The main aim of the article is to show how panpsychism, that is, the idea the everything in the world is endowed with a soul, was varied even during the periods in the history of philosophy when it flourished. In the Renaissance, I focus on Francesco Patrizi: he coined the term, which originally meant that everything is ensouled. The article starts by an investigation of Patrizi’s...

Translating Renaissance Neoplatonic panpsychism into seventeenth-century corpuscularism: the case of Sir Kenelm Digby (1603–1665)

Intellectual History Review December 14, 2023 Sergius Kodera

ABSTRACT Kenelm Digby was among the first authors in England to embrace Cartesianism. Yet Digby’s approach to the mind–body problem was irenic: in his massive Two treatises (Paris, 1644), the author advocates a corpuscular philosophy that is applied to physical bodies, whereas the intellectual capacities of human beings remain inexplicable through the powers of matter. The aim of the present...

Panpsychism and the mind-body problem in contemporary analytic philosophy

Intellectual History Review December 7, 2023 Emmett L. Holman

ABSTRACT Not so long ago, the idea that analytic philosophers would be taking panpsychism seriously would have been hard to believe. That is because in its early, logical positivist, stage, the analytic movement earned the reputation of being militantly anti-metaphysical. But analytic philosophy has come a long way since the heyday of logical positivism; and, in fact, the dialectic of recent...

A balsamic mummy. The medical-alchemical panpsychism of Paracelsus

Intellectual History Review November 23, 2023 Martin Žemla

ABSTRACT In this paper, I will argue how Paracelsus's concept of the universal ensoulment of nature may relate to his understanding of the self-healing capacity of the body, as shown in his Grosse Wundartzney (1536). Here, his new approach to medicine is visible, focusing not on retaining or restoring the balance of bodily humours but on strengthening the inner “essence” of life (the so-called...