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Everything about Hegemonikon

Ruling faculty of the soul in Greek philosophy of mind

The hegemonikon is a term in ancient Greek philosophy of mind for the soul's governing or commanding faculty, the part responsible for sensation, judgment, impulse and assent. Although the word had earlier use, the doctrine was most fully developed by the Stoics of the third century BCE, who held that the rational soul is a single, unified hegemonikon located in the heart and identified with the highest grade of pneuma. Because almost nothing of Chrysippus's own writing on the soul survives, the doctrine is known chiefly through the polemical commentary of the second-century physician Galen in De placitis Hippocratis et Platonis, which attacks the Stoic account from a cephalocentric and Platonic standpoint. The concept remained central to later Roman Stoicism, particularly in Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, and is a standard topic in modern scholarship on Hellenistic philosophy and the history of neuropsychology. Wikipedia →

🧭 Start here: a 6-step reading path

  1. Read the overview: HegemonikonA 5-minute orientation
  2. Pick up a classic book: KrugovanjeThe most-reprinted book on the subject
  3. Read the landmark paper: Salving the phenomena of mind: energy, hegemonikon, and sympathy in CudworthCited 7 times
  4. Go sideways: On PassionsA closely related topic
  5. Go sideways: StoicismA closely related topic

📖 Definitions

No dictionary entry for this exact phrase.

🗂️ The subject at a glance

  1. Etymology
  2. Pre-Stoic usage
  3. Stoic doctrine
  4. Location
  5. Galen's critique
  6. Roman Stoicism
  7. Modern scholarship

🏆 Landmark papers (most cited)

📚 Books worth reading

Ranked by number of editions on Open Library, a rough measure of how lasting a book is.

🔗 Related topics