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The understanding of the soul in the West has been profoundly shaped by Christianity, and its influence can be seen in certain assumptions often made about the soul: that, for example, if it does exist, it is separable from the body, free, immortal, and potentially pure. The ancient Greeks, however, conceived of the soul quite differently. In this ambitious new work, Michael Davis analyzes works by Homer, Herodotus, Euripides, Plato, and Aristotle to reveal how the ancient Greeks portrayed and understood what he calls “the fully human soul.”
Beginning with Homer’s Iliad, Davis lays out the tension within the soul of Achilles between immortality and life. He then turns to Aristotle’s De Anima and Nicomachean Ethics to explore the consequences of the problem of Achilles across the whole range of the soul’s activity. Moving to Herodotus and Euripides, Davis considers the former’s portrayal of the two extremes of culture—one rooted in stability and tradition, the other in freedom and motion—and explores how they mark the limits of character. Davis then shows how Helen and Iphigeneia among the Taurians serve to provide dramatic examples of Herodotus’s extreme cultures and their consequences for the soul. The book returns to philosophy in the final part, plumbing several Platonic dialogues—the Republic, Cleitophon, Hipparchus, Phaedrus, Euthyphro, and Symposium—to understand the soul’s imperfection in relation to law, justice, tyranny, eros, the gods, and philosophy itself. Davis concludes with Plato’s presentation of the soul of Socrates as self-aware and nontragic, even if it is necessarily alienated and divided against itself.
- Sales Rank: #396392 in Books
- Brand: Brand: University Of Chicago Press
- Published on: 2012-09-15
- Released on: 2011-04-15
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x .70" w x 6.00" l, .79 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 248 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
Review
“The Soul of the Greeks offers fresh interpretations of age-old texts that are deep, insightful, and revelatory. Richly rewarding, lucid, and original, Davis’s approach will add substantially to the existing scholarship.”
(Jill Frank, University of South Carolina)
“From Homer’s Iliad to Aristotle’s De Anima, from Herodotus’s history and Euripides’ tragedies to the Platonic dialogues, Michael Davis recovers, through his probing readings of the Greeks, the fundamental problem of the human soul. Attuned to the recurrent puzzles that lead to the philosophic core of these works, Davis explores and illuminates their understanding of the essential ‘alienation’ of soul—its distance from the world—as the condition for its deepest longing and the nature of soul revealed by its necessary imperfection.”
(Ronna Burger, Tulane University)
“In The Soul of the Greeks Michael Davis takes up what may be the central and still unsolved problem of ancient philosophy—namely, what is soul? On the basis of a series of careful readings of selections from Aristotle, Herodotus, Euripides, and Plato, Davis argues that the question cannot be approached or answered directly, because soul is characterized by a certain kind of duality. It cannot know itself without seeing itself as somehow other, nor can it achieve its desire to become one and immortal without destroying itself. As Davis indicates by including analyses of works that have been characterized as history and poetry as well as philosophy, the question of the character of the human soul is not merely at the heart of the ‘ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy’ (if there really is such a quarrel).� It extends from the question of personal identity to the character and grounds of our common life, including the possibility and basis of our knowledge of the world.”
(Catherine Zuckert, University of Notre Dame)
“Davis’s book illustrates the meaning of philosophy, as it moves its reader from ordinary experience to profound insight about our human condition. Its breadth is as far-reaching as its depth, for what it understands by ‘psychology’ involves poetry and tragedy, barbarism and civilization, knowledge and intelligibility, politics and history, and cosmic principles and the divine. We might say of Davis’s book what he himself says of one the texts he discusses, ‘there is much to think about here.’ The Soul of the Greeks deserves to be one of the more important philosophic works of this century.”
(Mary P. Nichols, Baylor University)
“[T]he volume is a feast, and I encourage any lover of the Greeks to taste of it.”
(Octavian Gabor, Bradley University Bryn Mawr Classical Review)
About the Author
Michael Davis�is professor of philosophy at�Sarah�Lawrence�College.
Most helpful customer reviews
16 of 18 people found the following review helpful.
A Doubled Book
By K. B. Housley
Michael Davis's "The Soul of the Greeks" stands midway between being a book for intelligent readers looking for an introduction to the Greek treatment of soul, and a scholarly text aimed largely at amateur and professional classicists and students of philosophy. For instance: Davis has transliterated Greek words throughout the text, but readers unfamiliar with the language may wish to use a sheet of printer paper as a bookmark or keep a notebook on hand to note how and when Davis uses his Greek terminology. While I cannot accurately judge how difficult it is to read the book without a knowledge of Greek, I can say that any reader not willing to work at learning the terms will find the book impossible to follow.
Davis wisely avoids what would seem to be the likely path of treating his authors in chronological order, instead beginning at the pinnacle and using Aristotle's discussions of soul in "De Anima" and the "Nicomachean Ethics" as the starting point for his text. The first chapter on Aristotle serves as an excellent introduction to "De Anima", while the second displays the harmony in "Nicomachean Ethics" by using its treatment of soul as the bridge between the two sections commonly intuited by modern commentators. From this foundation, his treatments of Herodotus, Euripedes and Plato.
Davis's last chapter on Plato is fascinating, but deals with a thorny feature of Greek grammar--the middle voice. Davis actually provides an admirable introduction to this grammatical feature in the chapter, one I will come back to if ever I find myself in the position of teaching others Greek. (I will certainly be recommending it to some friends who have mentioned struggling with the concept.) While the very fact of its being a chapter on a grammatical feature of a foreign language would suggest it is only for those who have some knowledge of the language, I believe that Davis's framing makes the essay worth it for those with patience.
A constant theme of Davis's book is "doubleness": A double nature of the soul, double treatment, double meaning, double power, double object. Such doubleness is bound up not only in the subject, but oftentimes in the polysemic character of the Greek tongue itself. The book itself also walks this doubled line: double audience, double method, etc. It is both a series of sharp exegetical essays and a serious attempt to recapture the question of soul for modern readers of philosophy. Even Davis's conclusion continues down the exegetical path, leaving the introduction as the only real source of statement for the book. (Readers may wish to read Davis's introduction both before and after the book.)
If Davis has not given his readers any answers, he will certainly clarify their questions. In this, the book fulfills its purpose.
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A note about the Kindle edition:
While I normally would have purchased a book like this in a print edition, I wanted to read it on vacation, and decided to get the Kindle version for ease. While the book looks fine in the Kindle edition, and the transfer is not marred by the all-too-usual mistakes, there are a couple of real problems. One is the special font used throughout, which sometimes creates awkward renderings on screen and will be "off-sized" compared to the majority of your books. The other is the way footnotes are treated (a common problem with academic presses), each with its own separate page at the back of the book. Some of the footnotes in the book are quite important, and a more compact footnote format would allow a reader to quickly "glance ahead" and make sure any coming footnotes contained non-bibliographic information. (It also artificially inflates the page-count, but that is a minor nuisance.)
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Excellent book!
By RUAN FERNANDES DA SILVA
Insightful and very important for further work on the subject. The book also offers intriguing discussions on aspects and relationship theme in Aristotelian thinking which allows a differentiated basis of metaphysical context from Plato. Finally an excellent read on the topic of Soul classics.
0 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Five Stars
By Heidi Ravven
Great!
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