The main aim of the article is to show how panpsychism, that is, the idea the everything in the world is endowed with a soul, was varied even during the periods in the history of philosophy when it flourished. In the Renaissance, I focus on Francesco Patrizi: he coined the term, which originally meant that everything is ensouled. The article starts by an investigation of Patrizi’s attempt to trace panpsychism back to the most ancient thinkers. His conclusions are, in general, (...) in agreement with current scholarly assessment of early Greek philosophers, whose views I attempt to reconstruct in a kind of survey. A closer comparison, however, shows significant differences between Patrizi’s and today’s account of the most ancient conception of panpsychism. While Patrizi uses the concept to state that the world as a whole is ensouled, early Greek philosophers understood it to mean that every thing in the world possesses a particular soul. From a broader perspective, it is clear that, while Patrizi builds on the notion of all-embracing ancient philosophy, modern scholarship assumes a more historical account of ancient thought characterised by a gradual progress from simple, more empirically based concepts, to more complex and metaphysical ones. (shrink)

The studies of Empedocles have made headway in showing that Empedocles postulated a double zoogony. Whereas this has been traditionally related to the hypothesis of two worlds per cycle, some Empedoclean fragments provide evidence for a double zoogony in a cosmic cycle with one world. How can we reconcile the hypothesis of two zoogonies with the assumption of a unique world? Whereas there have been attempts to address this question by retaining the traditional idea of two opposite zoogonic periods or (...) phases, I contend that Empedocles’ fragments invite us to a reconsideration of his notion of a double birth and death of mortal beings. (shrink)