The Greek Discovery of the Soul
"The inflection or rupture between paganism and Christianity is... not in the rigorous distinction between the body and the soul -- the already ancient achievement of Greek philosophy..." -- Pierre Manent, The Metamorphoses of the City , p. 240 This historical fact, although it certainly is not a refutation of materialism, is somewhat of an embarrassment for the usual materialist etiology of ideas. The very idea of a "soul," per that materialist narrative, is some fanciful religious notion cooked up by primitive people to comfort themselves in the face of death. Once people begin to think "rationally," the obvious nonsensicalness of this concept becomes apparent. Except, historically speaking, at least in the West*, that was not how things went at all: from Persia westward to Britain, there was no indigenous religion with the idea of a soul as something sharply distinguished from the body.** Instead, this idea was developed by a lineage of thinkers wh...