Ἐπιθυμητικόν (epithumetikon)
Appetitive part — between diaphragm and navel
Epithumetikon — the appetitive part of the soul: the part 'with which it loves and hungers and thirsts and is excited by the other desires' (Republic IV.439d). It is the largest of the three parts in most people and the most insatiable. Its goods are food, drink, sex, and money as the universal means to those — and Plato is precise that it is not vicious as such, only ungoverned. Timaeus 70d–72d localises it explicitly between the diaphragm and the navel, 'binding it down there as one binds a wild animal' — the appetitive part is so disordered that the gods devised the liver as a smooth bright surface on which images from reason might be reflected back as warnings, the Platonic origin-myth of divination by the liver. We anchor the rendered point at the navel, the centre of the Timaean abdominal compartment; in clinical-Platonic readings (Galen onward) the liver itself is often given as the more specific seat.
Point 3 of 3 in Plato's Tripartite Soul (Republic IV)
Cross-tradition overlaps
No overlapping points are registered for this point.
Sources
Plato, Republic IV.439d (primary_canonical)
“That with which the soul loves and hungers and thirsts and is fluttered by the other desires we shall call the irrational and appetitive part, companion of replenishments and pleasures.”
Plato, Timaeus 70d–71b (primary_canonical)
“The part of the soul which has appetites for food and drink and the other things of which it has need, they placed between the midriff and the boundary of the navel, contriving in all this region a sort of manger for the body's nourishment, and there they bound this part down like a wild animal.”