Por qué sólo las almas humanas son humanas. Proclo, Platón y la tradición platónica sobre el alma tripartita

Abstract

When Proclus tries to clarify what is it in a human soul that makes it properly human, he draws (in In Plat. Tim. II) an explanation which combines both the Platonic way of understanding the tripartite soul with some kind of re-translation of this schema in Aristotelian mould. In this pages I give a brief overview of some steps given by the Platonic tradition in order to strengthen this development of the tripartite schema built in Republic IV (an original Platonic theory of action) in a Peripatetic one (which observes rather the different levels of organic nature). Then, I return to Proclus, to his commentary on the final pages of Timaeus –a text that is only preserved in an Arabic translation--, in order to show that Proclus is clearly conscious of the hermeneutical transformation made by the Platonic tradition on the original model, which he asserts to be previous and at least so functional as the Aristotelian one.