Pneuma

This article is about the philosophical concept. For other uses, see Pneuma (disambiguation).

Pneuma (πνεῦμα) is an ancient Greek word for "breath", and in a religious context for "spirit" or "soul".[1][2] It has various technical meanings for medical writers and philosophers of classical antiquity, particularly in regard to physiology, and is also used in Greek translations of ruach רוח in the Hebrew Bible, and in the Greek New Testament.

In classical philosophy, it is distinguishable from psyche (ψυχή), which originally meant "breath of life", but is regularly translated as "spirit" or most often "soul".[3]

  1. ^ Entry πνεῦμα, in Liddell-Scott-Jones, A Greek–English Lexicon, online version.
  2. ^ See pp.190, 195, 205 of François, Alexandre (2008), "Semantic maps and the typology of colexification: Intertwining polysemous networks across languages", in Vanhove, Martine (ed.), From Polysemy to Semantic change: Towards a Typology of Lexical Semantic Associations, Studies in Language Companion Series, vol. 106, Amsterdam, New York: Benjamins, pp. 163–215.
  3. ^ Cite error: The named reference Furley1999 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).