Soul

Soul

Plato
1. Plato believed that the should existed before the body
2. Humans remember things from a previous life before that of the body
  1. Such as our ability to recognise goodness and beauty
3. Plato said that we need to be liberated from bodily needs to contemplate our souls
4. Plato thought philosophers souls lived on in a state of wisom
5. The soul is closer to the forms
6. Plato sought permanence and if it cannot be found in this material world it must exist in the realm of the forms
  1. Adopted the idea of the soul as immortal
7. For Plato, death is nothing to fear as it is shaking off the temporary body
  1. Platos soul ultimately desires to get out of the inferior body in which it is trapped
Aristotle
1. For Aristotle, the soul is not a simple, immortal substance as it was for Plato
  1. When the light goes out and the soul dies, I go back to being a lump of matter
    1. There is no person left, the idea that the soul goes to another world is not part of Aritstotle's understanding
2. Aristotle is more than a materialist, the soul is not reducible to physics and chemistry. Matter needs the soul to animate it
3. Through the soul people develop their character, the soul is the thing that makes a living thing what it is
4. The vegetative soul
  1. Shared with all living things, including plants
5. The appetitive soul
  1. in which we find passions and appetites, such as hunger, thirst and sexual desire
6. The intellectual soul
  1. Which is rational and directive - thinks about and decides things
Descartes
1. René Descartes represents perhaps the most extreme form of substance dualism which is the idea that two elements (mind and body) are wholly different substances
2. He begins his philosophical work by asking whether there is any knowledge so certain that no one may doubt it
3. He notes how sense experience may be mistaken. This might mean that the material world and even the body might be an illusion
  1. He concludes that the cognito is the only certain piece of knowledge.
Gilbert Ryle (1900-76)
1. His best known work is 'the concept of mind' which is famous for its attempts to refute substance dualism as proposed by Descartes
Dawkins
1. Dawkins is a materialist thinker, he rejects any notion of the disembodied soul espoused by Plato and Descartes
2. He finds no empirical evidence for such an entity and mocks religious believers for supporting the notion
3. Dawkins makes an interesting distinction, between what he calls soul one and soul two
  1. Soul one: is the separate substance of much traditional thought. Dawkins rejects this notion as primitive superstition.
  2. Soul two: is intellectual and spiritual power, higher development of the moral faculties, feelings and emotions. These are rooted in the body and their precise nature is yet to be scientifically explained
Dualism
1. The belief that we have two elements - the body and the soul
2. If this is true, a problem remains of how the purely physical body can be influenced or directed by the spiritual soul
3. If my body is hurt my mind feels it
4. Just as it feels sensations of hunger and thirst when my body needs nourishment
Monism
1. The view that we are one substance not two
2. in this view, thinking is just something that human bodies do, just as the body of an amoeba splits into two new creatures
3. This view is not without problem. Amoeba split for physical and biological reasons, human consciousness seems to have capacities which go well beyond those necessary for mere survival or continuation of species

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	Created by Rachael Priestley about 6 years ago