Demons, ghosts and spirits in the philosophical tradition

Abstract

It is widely accepted that philosophy started in the VI century BC as a transition from irrational thinking to the rational or philosophical thinking. This transition, however, did not take place overnight, but just the opposite. In the same way that Parmenides was a philosopher even though we only have a poem written by him, Plato used myths as a part of his explanations of several philosophical points. These situations already show what we try to demonstrate here: the so-called rational thinking –which usually belongs to philosophy - is not so pure nor rational. There are several important cases in which irrational concepts, such as demons, ghosts and spirits, were used in order to create philosophical arguments. The main figures of the philosophical panorama (i.e. Socrates, Descartes and Hegel) used these concepts that seem to belong to a different context rather than to philosophy. There is a pattern that repeats in these three philosophers –all of them lived in a period of transition. Perhaps these periods needed this kind of “out of the way” concepts to allow thinkers to face the new challenges they had to encounter.