ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Ficino’s reading of Plotinus’s psychology in light of his desire to counter the naturalism of the Greek Aristotelian commentator Alexander of Aphrodisias (fl. 200 C.E.), who saw the human mind as a force developing from the elementary dispositions of matter. To counter the Alexandrist position, Ficino showed that Plotinus’s view that the soul gives life to the body without becoming ontologically involved with it describes the formation and nature of the living being much better than the belief that the soul is inseparable from the body and therefore dies along with it.
