preview

Leontius's 'Soul In Socrates'

Decent Essays
Open Document

Leontius’s soul is probably not two, for this would be senseless. In fact, this should not even be considered in this analysis since it is by definition one thing. That is, if the soul turned out to be several things, we would redefine the soul to be the combination of those things and then assign that severalness to the parts of the soul. The time is not two, for Socrates says that Leontius desired to look and was disgusted at the same time. The corpses as a whole are not two, for it is not one corpse that he desires to see and another that he has aversion to seeing. Since the only thing left is the part of the soul with respect to which Leontius has the opposite affections, there must actually be two parts of the soul at work here. This new …show more content…

What will be important to remember, however, is that what is by nature simple is not always simple in speech. Speech, as Aristotle notes, is able to make clear what before was clouded. When one visits a friend’s house for this first time and, still standing in the threshold, is told “come in, there are drinks at the back porch,” a new part of the world is discovered. Before hearing this, one probably did not even know that the back porch existed, let alone that there were drinks available at it. Now, however, not only is a vague image of this porch present in one’s mind, but that image also contains drinks. It should be noted that this new image of the porch and its generous stock of drinks is not simply a mental phenomenon that corresponds to a physical location. We may speak of it as such, if that suits our purposes, but this is not how the image of the porch is naturally experienced. It has a place in one’s world in the same way that our spatial-visual awareness of the part of the room behind us does. Both the image of the porch and the spatio-visual awareness of the part of the room behind us are imagined images, but unlike imagined images of sea monsters, both are intuitively parts of the world rather than mere symbols for parts of the world. Thus, this porch, which is at once a mental image and a part of the world, was revealed by means of speech. This is the virtue of

Get Access