Dicaearchus on the Soul
A new edition of the extant evidence about Dicaearchus of Messana(Mirhady 2001) has actualized a longstanding controversy over the Peripatetic teaching on the soul. Did Dicaearchus indeed deem soul to be nothing at all? Did he accept(against Aristotle) the ‘harmonical' view on the soul? If so, what kind of harmony was meant? The fragmentary nature of our evidence on Dicaearchus permits, as is usually the case, various interpretations. Some scholars insist on fundamentally conflicting nature of the evidence (Gottschalk 1971, Sharples 2001), others admit of possibility to produce a more coherent picture and believe that the interpretative difficulties are not,in fact, intractable (Caston 2001 and the present author). Placing the controversy in the context of a debate over the nature of the soul within the Lyceum, we observe that against both Plato and Aristotle, Dicaearchus seems to develop a peculiar theory of the soul as an ‘attunement', or a harmony, of bodily parts. These parts are not necessarily to be viewed as the primary elements (contrary to a single evidence, which is clearly his own interpretation, of Nemesius, De nat. hom. 2), and this bodily attunement is quite different from the ‘Pythagorean' mathematical harmony. According to our Peripatetic philosopher, there is no thinking beyond body in a certain state (Sextus Emp., Adv. Math. 7.348-349). To put it differently, the body has an innate ability to think while all the talks on possessing and receiving souls ( animalia, animantes, empsycha) are misleading. The idea of heavenly travel of the soul may help to account for religious events, such as divination and dreams, but it has no scientific value whatsoever. The paper is supplemented with a new Russian translation of the evidence.