Aaron Johnson, Lee University
This paper seeks to elucidate Porphyry’s engagement with Plato’s claim that plants are animals, participating in the third part of the soul (Tim. 76e7-77c5), as part of the third century Neoplatonist’s embryology in his To Gaurus on the Ensoulment of Embryos 4-9 (a text assigned to Galen in the single surviving manuscript but now universally accepted as Porphyrian). The basic thesis of this treatise is that ensoulment in a proper sense occurs upon the parturition of the infant, not at conception or at some point during gestation. One of the primary reasons that Porphyry raises to defend this claim is the fact that the embryo is more like a plant than an animal. Unnamed opponents had appealed to Plato’s passage on plants being animals since, they thought, it would imply that the embryo is therefore an animal itself and thus ensouled. In response, Porphyry acknowledges that, while plants (and by extension embryos) are living and hence “animal”, it is only the vegetative part of the soul that animates them and hence they cannot be properly said to be ensouled since they still lack the self-moved soul, which only arrives at parturition. His negotiation with the text of Plato is undergirded by a series of fascinating considerations that not only highlight the extent to which the Platonic text utilizes homonymy, metaphor, or analogy in its language (4.5-10), but also privilege “investigation” or direct “observation of what happens” (τὴν ζήτησιν, 4.7; σκοπεῖσθαι τὸ γιγνόμενον, 10.1; cf. 12.1) and “confirmation based on the facts” (τῶν γιγνομένων τὰς πίστεις, 3.4) over abstract reason and probability (τῆς τοῦ λόγου δυνάμεως… τῷ πιθανῷ εἰκότι, 6.1). It is when he leaves Plato behind in his “image” of the introduction of a ship’s captain to a ship that Porphyry makes clear the limits of analogy and also exhibits an equivocal use of the term “nature” due to the fact that nature not only guides physical and psychological processes “from above” as it were (as the “nature of the whole”), but is also infused in the bodies involved in those processes (as the nature of the father, mother, and infant, 10.4-6). The whole of his discussion is rife with details that are crucial for determining Porphyry’s overall conception of nature and the natural world expressed in more well-known texts (such as his On Abstinence from Eating Animals), the application of his psychological insights to particular moments in a human life, the extent to which his Platonic readings are informed by Aristotelian thinking, and the importance of lived experience and observation in his epistemology.