Soul, mind and body (2)

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  • Created on: 07-12-20 17:02
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  • Soul, mind and body (2)
    • Gilbert Ryle
      • Rejected substance dualism and refuted Decartes'
        • Used the term 'ghost in a machine'
      • A category mistake
        • says the mind and soul cannot be something separate, they are interconnected parts of the individual you
      • may be described as a monist, but he does not call himself one
    • Aristotle
      • De Anima - on the soul
      • may be a dualist - says humans have a soul that may survive after death
        • though may be a materialist as he doesn't believe in life after death
        • may be monist - more to humans than just a physical body
          • it indubitably follows that the soul is inseparable from the body
      • says the soul is not something separate from the living thing, the soul is property of humans, not additional to the body
      • the soul is the form or essence of living things, the formal cause
        • the body is the material cause, and the soul makes up the personality and characteristics. It cannot be separate from the body
        • without the soul, the body is unintelligible. the soul enables us to fulfil our final cause  - eudaimonia
      • Aristotle said that every living thing has a soul; plants, animals and living things
      • There is a hierarchy of the soul. He argued that not all living things have the same faculties of the soul
        • -nutrition           -desire            -locomotion     -perception     -reason
        • Humans: the rational soul
        • Animals: appetitive soul
        • Plants: vegetative soul
      • Life After Death
        • did not seem to allow for the possibility of the immortal soul
        • the soul does not exist independently of the body, when the body dies, the soul dies
          • except for the 'nous'
        • he said that the faculty of reason possessed by humans souls may have eternal properties and survive death in some way
    • Richard Dawkins
      • strong atheist - 'religions are not imaginative, not poetic, not soulful'
      • science has shown that many things that we thought to be true in the past have been found to be not true
        • science has either killed the soul or is in the process of doing so
      • Dawkins thinks that the idea of the soul is a meme
        • a meme is an idea that spreads from person to person in a culture
      • rejects any concept of an immortal soul, views removed from Plato
        • he emphasises the idea of consciousness and DNA
          • the soul was invented by the ancients to explain consciousness
            • the epistemic gap - filling the gap with religion
      • soul one - traditional, religious meaning - separate to the body - science can kill soul one
      • soul two - metaphorical and symbolic - deep feeling and imagination - science cannot kill it

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