Making-up a 'body': Early Academics and Stoics on the (in)corporeality of the soul.

 This project is a historical and philosophical analysis of how the notion of spatial extension is employed in a dispute which engaged the immediate successors of Plato and Early Stoics. The matter of disagreement –grounded in the framework of the soul-body relationship– concerned the conditions for something to act upon something else. 
According to the Stoics, Early Academics were wrong to believe the soul was incorporeal, for body alone is capable of acting and being acted upon. If the controversy is understandable given the very different commitments the two schools have when it comes to describing the world (the Stoic school is characterised by a strong commitment to corporeality, while Early Academics operate within a Platonic dualistic conception of the world), the terms of the discussion tell a more fascinating story: while defining the opposite concepts of soul (Early Academics) and body (Stoics), both schools make use of the notion of ‘extension’.
From a philosophical point of view, this project aims at investigating (i) what are considered to be sufficient criteria for incorporeality and corporeality in the two schools respectively; and (ii) to what extent the notion of ‘extension’ plays a role for defining something as ‘body’. From a historical point of view, the project aims at defining the various phases of the dispute, so to substantiate the research hypothesis that Stoicism emerges out of a dialectic with the first successors of Plato.