«Quod anima sit in horizonte duorum mundorum». Psicologia e antropologia in Guglielmo d’Alvernia

This essay focuses on a particular set of anthropological ideas in circulation in Paris during the first half of the thirteenth–century, followed by a diachronic analysis which takes into account the Teaching as a whole. The two main questions to be explored are: a) what is the soul? b) what is the relationship between the soul and the body? We will see how William of Auvergne not only developed a negative concept of the body, in an Orphic–Platonic mold (i.e. the prison of the soul), but, further, that his speculation points toward a parallelism between the inner and external worlds. He presents an anthropology based upon a psychology of the divine image as imprinted on the soul, which states that man’s being is an image in the likeness of God (homo divinae similitudinis formae).