Ricerc@Sapienza

This paper aims at collecting and presenting relevant evidence about Hans Jonas’s interpretation of the Socratic philosophy. Against the background of a strong appreciation of Socrates’s research method – a positive evaluation widespread in many passages of works published by Jonas during his life as well as in some unpublished texts (but now available in the new Kritische Gesamtausgabe or published autonomously by other scholars after his death) – more specific attention will be devoted to a short, but highly significant paper: Socratic Virtue and Wisdom.

Our aim is to show how materialistic monism, which is the dominant metaphysics of natural sciences, reduces the mental ambit to the brain's physical/biological substrate. We refer to two variants of this monism by pointing out the main reason for their failure, i.e. the hard problem of consciousness. For this reason, we think that a more effective alternative to materialistic monism is neutral monism, of which processual monism is one version that has its own strong specificity.

As a world view based on reason and revelation, ?aiva nondualism is expected to have its roots in ?aiva scriptures. Indeed, one of the most popular divisions of the ?aiva scriptures presents three sets of texts, characterised by dualism, dualism-cum-nondualism and nondualism, promulgated by ?iva, Rudra and Bhairava, respectively, in the number of ten, eighteen and sixty-four.