Seba.Health
Figure · Seba Knowledge Graph
David B. Claus
David B. Claus
David B. Claus is an American classical philologist whose 1981 monograph Toward the Soul: An Inquiry into the Meaning of Psyche before Plato (Yale) is one of the standard modern treatments of the semantic history of ψυχή from Homer through the Presocratics. Claus belongs in the small line of philologists — alongside Snell, Onians, Bremmer, Padel, and Sullivan — whose work supplies the headwater scholarship for any depth psychology that takes its classical roots seriously.
Claus’s contribution to the present graph is his sustained close-reading of the Heraclitean psyche fragments, which he calls “the most complicated and elusive body of material that must be dealt with in this study” (Claus 1981, p. 138). His refusal to flatten the Heraclitean polysemy — psyche as physical entity governed by the same cycle as cosmic fire (B 36, B 77, B 117) and psyche as the bearer of an intangible inner self (B 117, B 45) — is the philological warrant for the plural in logoi psyches. His treatment of logos in B 50 and B 108 as both the wisdom-bearing object of knowledge and the agent who confers wisdom (Claus 1981, p. 134) parallels Sullivan’s reading of B 45 and B 115 and reinforces the case that Heraclitus is the moment when psyche and logos first come into load-bearing relation.