Reconstructing the Philosophy of daimones in Plato and the Presocratics

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The word daimon has occupied a central position in Greek philosophical and religious thought from the earliest times. For example, Hesiod made the golden race of men guardian daimones (Op. 121-6), Empedocles declared himself a daimon (B 115) and Parmenides opens his poem by saying that his philosophical journey takes him along the hodos daimonos (B 1.2-3) and wrote that a daimon in the middle of the spherical cosmos steers all (B 12). This tradition culminates in the dialogues of Plato where both the rational part of soul and Eros are called by the name of daimon (Ti. 90a-d; Symp. 202d-203a). Having worked in my MPhil on the connection between the daimon in Plato and the early Greek thinkers, my contention at this point is that Hesiod established a model of how to use the concept daimon in philosophy that the subsequent philosophical tradition used as a basis from which to expound their individual views of the relationship between mortal and divine.At present, there is no study that traces the full history of the concept daimon in philosophy, which might provide a framework within which to explore this concept in a coherent way. Yet the rich evidence that the word daimon was used over centuries by philosophers for some of their most important ideas, such as in the passages referred to above, naturally suggests that such a study is urgently needed. Nevertheless, the only book I have been able to find that attempts a comparative analysis between Platonic and Presocratic demonology is Jensen's Dualism and Demonology from 1966, which considers only the Symposium and Pythagoreanism. Thus, there remains a large gap in our understanding of the philosophical application of the words daimon and daimonios that I aim to fill with my PhD. Due to the topic being so understudied I envisage that my comparative approach will yield groundbreaking results that will reintroduce daimon as one of the essential themes of Greek philosophy.At this stage I anticipate the following structure to my PhD: First I will show that the Presocratics and Plato operate with four different strands of thought on the daimon, viz. (1) as a post mortem guardian, (2) as an intermediate (metaxu) between mortal and divine, (3) as a physical substance and (4) as the philosopher's guide. Second, I want to use the testimony of the later Platonists, Plutarch, Apuleius and Plotinus, to shed light on Plato's views on daimones. Third, I want finally to use my findings to reconstruct a philosophy of daimones in Plato and the Presocratics. Amongst the philosophical benefits of this study is an understanding of the way that the Greek philosophers regarded the correlation between religion and philosophy and mortal and divine.Because of the expertise in Plato, the Presocratics and the intersection between philosophy and religion at Cambridge, I believe that my project is particularly pertinent to the research interests of the Faculty, and I would be delighted to explore these ideas with Dr Sheffield, Professor Warren and Professor Betegh.