The human body is tied to a distinctive form of natural beauty, for Hegel proposes that there is something about the human body in its given, natural form that makes it uniquely capable of manifesting self-conscious spirit or mind. Since, ontologically speaking, the being of spirit is of a higher order than anything in nonhuman nature, the capacity to give off the distinctive look and sound of a spiritual way of being amounts to the human body’s capacity for a higher, fuller beauty as well. This chapter focuses primarily on the naturally given, predominantly involuntary ways in which the human body allows spirituality to appear. Because Hegel characterizes artworks generally as involving a “spiritualizing” of otherwise natural forms, we are encouraged to think of the human body’s distinctive, spirit-manifesting demeanor as a kind of root aesthetic vocabulary with which all of the more developed “languages” of art are familiar and from which they grow. But it also seems that for Hegel it ultimately takes art, and in particular classical sculpture, to reveal the purportedly natural beauty of the body, and this complicates the sense in which bodily beauty is natural after all.

This chapter argues that ‘belief’ is neither the only, nor the most appropriate, concept for understanding the mental and experiential dimensions of Greek religion. It argues that the dichotomy between ritualistic and belief-centred conceptions of religion that has long shaped the debate over Greek religion reflects an underlying dualism of mind and body. Under the influence of this dualism, the domain of religion has been divided into categories of ritual, which belongs to the body, and belief, which belongs to the mind. This chapter draws on recent work in anthropology that seeks to collapse this mind–body dualism to propose a concept of skilled perception as the basis of an alternative approach to religion in the lived experience of the Greeks. This approach is developed through a series of studies of normative and divergent acts of religious perceiving, via a close reading of Theophrastus’ ‘Superstitious Man’ (Characters 16) and a selection of episodes of divination and omen-perception in Herodotus and Xenophon. These studies suggest that we might view Greek religion less as a body of beliefs and rituals and more as a skill for living in a dynamic world.

Chapter 2 first discusses the fact that humans form one of the many millions of animal species that, along with non-animal species, all occupy a place in the big “tree of life,” followed by two responses which aim to single out humans as fundamentally different, especially in terms of their mental capacities. Given our focus of attention on the mind, we discuss the notions mind–body dualism and modularity. The remainder of this chapter offers a preview of many issues that will be discussed in more detail in subsequent chapters. We review the central question how people come to know what they know in some detail, which allows us to be more precise about what we mean by “nature” and “nurture.” We then focus on Noam Chomsky’s Innateness Hypothesis for language, considering its impact in all fields that study human behavior. We preview what this hypothesis entails about how children acquire their language and the predictions it makes about general, universal properties that all languages share. We discuss why Chomsky’s Innateness Hypothesis is controversial and conclude the chapter with some genetic and neurological aspects of the innateness claim.

The primary goal of Chapter 3 is to introduce some of the important themes that have come up when philosophers think about the (human) mind, where it comes from and how it relates to the body and to the surrounding world. To this end, we visit a division of philosophy called the philosophy of mind, which will involve a review of a variety of “-isms” (such as rationalism, empiricism, mind–body dualism, monism, materialism, idealism, behaviorism, physicalism, associationism, and so on). We also meet a number of important philosophers who have developed various and often opposing views on the nature–nurture issue. We conclude with a discussion of what philosophers of mind call “the hard problem,” how to explain the notion of consciousness.