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This chapter raises and explains two central questions about Plato’s theory of the tripartite soul. First, what is involved in Plato’s claim that the embodied human soul is a thing of parts? Secondly, does Plato have a reasonable basis for holding that the soul is composed of precisely three parts, reason, spirit, and appetite?

The chapter takes up the argument for the tripartition of the soul in Republic and the consequent deepening of the account of personhood. An embodied tripartite soul is a disunited person or self. Selfhood for the embodied person is chronically episodic and plastic. Self-transformation can now be articulated in terms of the unifying of the person into one part, the rational faculty. With tripartitioning, Plato deals more perspicuously with the relation of person to human being and body. The embodied person is an entity capable of self-reflexively identifying itself as the subject of one or another of its psychic capacities. The successful embodied person strives for and ultimately achieves a permanent identification with a subject of rational activity.

This chapter shows that the split-D hypothesis helps to account for the Gungbe pronouns. The first section discusses current theoretical analysis of the pronominal system cross-linguistically. Extending this analysis to the Gungbe data, the next section demonstrates that the Gungbe pronominal system can be characterized in terms of a tripartition that postulates the existence of strong, weak, and clitic pronouns. The last section concludes the chapter.

This chapter solves the partition problem of the previous chapter. It posits an ontology which is organised into nested power sets, denoted by two features (author, participant) and their host head. Crucially, these features are bivalent and their values denote operations between sets, allowing one set-denoting feature to act on another. The chapter shows that, once the systems can account for the most basic partitions, all and only the others follow, depending on a semantic parameter of order of composition.

Chapter 1 defends the seriousness of Plato’s commitment to the tripartite theory of the soul that he presents in the Republic, Phaedrus, and Timaeus. This defense constitutes a response to skeptical commentators who suggest his investment in tripartite psychology, and especially in a spirited part of that psychology, is unserious, tentative, or temporary. It also surveys the language Plato uses to describe the different “parts” of the soul, and it sketches an interpretation of tripartition according to which each of the three parts is a distinct source of the psychic motions and motivations that cause and explain human action. The spirited part of the soul, on this interpretation, is one such source of motivation.

Chapter 6 examines Plato’s account of moral education in the Republic. It argues that musical and gymnastic training in the Kallipolis primarily aim at shaping the spirited part of the soul through social, political, and cultural influences and practices. In particular, music aims to make spirit gentle and instill in it the right emotional habits toward moral and immoral people, actions, and objects in the world. Gymnastics, meanwhile, aims to invigorate it and make it “strong” enough to act as reason’s “ally” effectively. Music and gymnastics also have important effects on reason and appetite as well, however. Music exercises reason and prepares it for its proper function in the souls of mature adults, and gymnastic training promotes necessary appetites while eliminating or preventing unnecessary ones.

Chapter 8 examines Plato’s account of intrapsychic “communication” in the Timaeus and defends an imagistic account according to which the various activities of the spirited part of the soul—the motivations it generates, its training through musical and gymnastic education, its responsiveness to rational judgment, and its resistance to offensive appetites—can all be explained at the cognitive level by appealing only to the resources of sense-perception, memory, and imagination. On this view, it is not necessary to attribute to spirit the capacity either to understand the “logistic” (i.e. linguistic or propositional) content of rational judgments themselves, or to issue judgments with such content of its own. This chapter also examines how Plato adapts the Homeric and poetic association of thumos with the heart and circulatory system (as well as with the lungs and respiratory system) to provide a biological foundation for the dialogue’s theory of spirited cognition.

Chapter 9 argues that the Statesman characterizes the task of the politician as one that prominently requires attention to distinctively spirited aspects of the human soul. According to the dialogue’s final section, the primary problem of politics is that of producing harmony between, or “weaving” together, two main types of citizens that naturally tend toward conflict with one another: the “courageous” and the “moderate.” This chapter argues that the Statesman’s treatment of civic unity is largely a discussion of spirited political psychology: the “courageous” citizens incline toward behavior associated with the aggressive side of thumos, while the “moderate” tend toward behavior associated with its gentle side. Moreover, this treatment is set up earlier in the dialogue through the Myth of Cronus, which is designed to expose the inadequacy of conceptions of politics that ignore the social desires and emotions of human beings that are most relevant to politics.

Chapter 10 argues that although Plato does not explicitly present tripartition in the Laws, the theory continues to inform his social and political philosophy. His thinking about spirit is evident through the Athenian Visitor’s response to what he perceives as undue Cretan and Spartan emphasis on cultivating courage, competitiveness, and martial virtue at the expense of moderation, cooperation, and friendship. Much of the text is designed to stress the importance of the latter set of civic qualities, and Plato’s exploration of ways to develop them reflects the influence of his two-sided theory of thumos. The dialogue’s extensive treatment of moral education, moreover, shows that Plato continues to view spirited motivation, and even a distinct spirited part of the soul, as a primary target of both musical and gymnastic education, as well as of education provided by the laws themselves.

This essay discusses the Confessions’ aporetic method—specifically its versions of Meno’s paradox, beginning in Book 1, about how we can search for God if we don’t already know him. Augustine says that belief in God guides us in searching until we know him. But how can we have intentional attitudes toward God—belief or desire—if we haven’t yet encountered him? Augustine’s solution comes partly in Book 7’s analysis of God as truth, partly in Book 10’s argument that we have an irreducible desire for truth: although we desire joy, joy requires a propositional content, and ceteris paribus we prefer joy based on true rather than on false stories. I explore how Augustine’s aporetic accounts of memory and of temptation function together in Book 10. The theory of the three temptations, and especially of “curiosity,” shows why desire for happiness—for joy based on truth—does not always prevail.

This chapter offers a deep critique of a commonly held view that the Stoic system of philosophy consists in the tripartition of philosophy into logic, physics, and ethics. The teaching of philosophy is distinguished from the transmission of doctrine, showing that whilst tripartition might be useful for the former, the latter is concerned with the transmission of an interrelated whole which the Stoics call, for the first time in the history of philosophy, a ‘systēma’, whose internal regimentation is not dependent on tripartition. Views of successive generations of Stoics are analysed, including a vindication of the orthodoxy of Zeno of Tarsus and Posidonius, which leads to a broader reappraisal of the ancient historiography on these matters, sifting through the agendas of the first generation of Platonists and the later classifications of Sextus Empiricus; a critique of modern historiography is also broached, targeting in particular the work of Pierre Hadot. The Stoic notion of a systēma is examined in detail from different perspectives as the basis for the Stoic definitions of knowledge, science, and the constitution of an argument, as also, at the macro-level, for the structure of the cosmos, describing thus the foundations of the unity of the cosmic city, supported by cosmic sympathy, so as ultimately to identify lekta as the keystones of this structure.

Tripartition (the three appearances of Octavia and of the Chorus of Romans on the drama’s ‘Day Before’, ‘Wedding Day’, and ‘Day After’) is basically what structures the play. The trajectory of Octavia, from inside the palace, to the palace threshold and finally to the harbour of her deportation represents a closely interlocking movement in time and place that is unparalleled in extant ancient drama, as is the emphasis on symmetries and contrasts, visual and otherwise. The role of the Chorus of Romans as opposed to the so-called Palace Chorus and the implied topography of the final harbour scene are examined; from internal evidence a location in Campania is suggested. The plot’s structure is then compared to the historical tradition concerning Nero’s murder of Octavia, the parallels and contrasts laying bare the dramatist’s efforts to abbreviate and telescope a long and convoluted sequence into a well-calibrated, close-knit, new whole.

Here the focus is on the scenes with Seneca confronting Nero. It is argued that they fall into three clearly demarcated sections of 60 x 96 x 60 verses: first, Seneca’s great monologue on the Neronian Iron (not, as officially claimed, Golden) Age, building up to Nero’s entrance; then their first confrontation pro et contra executions or clementia; and finally, their confrontation pro et contra divorcing Octavia and marrying Poppaea. The analysis closely examines the techniques of dramatic speech, the use of stichomythia offset by more expansive speeches, and the use of the impersonal contrasted by the use of vocatives. It further highlights the deft use of meta-theatricality, in a continuous dialogue with various texts by Seneca ‘himself’. The values of the De clementia are here defended by its ‘author’, thereby casting Seneca as the champion of Octavia and the Roman people, and Nero as their enemy.

The chapter discusses the drama’s single most influential scene. Poppaea’s initial silence, her dream narrative, and the foregrounding of the visual made a huge impact on Renaissance tragedy. Its emphasis on tripartition and symmetry and on the cross-referential evocation of the drama’s beginning is dramatically effective. The use of a mise-en-abyme technique brilliantly makes Poppaea’s dream narrative mirror the actual setting and lets the double-layered wedding-funeral imagery find its culmination in the ambiguous murder-suicide scene involving Poppaea’s former and present husbands, Crispinus and Nero. With misguided protectiveness, the nurse attempts to interpret the dream in a favourable light, thereby only adding to the sense of doom. Poppaea tellingly refuses to re-enter the bedchamber setting of her prophetic nightmare. This prophecy is shown to presuppose precise knowledge as to the deaths of Poppaea, Crispinus, their son and, finally, Nero (June 68), thus providing a clear terminus post.

The chapter first argues that the search to identify the dramatist is futile and then addresses the far richer, but strangely neglected, evidence for the dramatic conventions and stagecraft presupposed by this script. The main focus is on the plot’s tripartition and the frequent changes of time and place. These aspects are related to the evidence for the Roman use of flats, ductiles, and vers(at)iles, whereby changes of setting are indicated. The use of curtains to hide such changes, as well as of movable props, in casu representing imperial statues, is also discussed. Challenging the position advocated by Otto Zwierlein and his adherents, it is argued that this and similar dramatic apparatus refute the claim that this was a drama that Roman scaenici would have been unable to perform.

This chapter argues that although the Republic’s tripartite theory of the soul is not explicitly endorsed in Plato’s late work the Laws, it continues to inform the Laws from beneath the surface of the text. In particular, the spirited part of the soul continues to play a major role in moral education and development in the Laws (as it did in earlier texts, where it is characterized as reason’s psychic ‘ally’). The chapter examines the programs of musical and gymnastic education in the Laws and highlights parallels to the accounts of the spirited part of the soul and its role in moral education and virtue that are offered in Republic and Timaeus. It also examines the educational role given to the laws themselves in Magnesia, and suggests that the education provided through them is largely directed at the spirited part of the soul as well.