The Soul, Mind & the Body
- Created by: Kingstephiee
- Created on: 11-03-21 20:43
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- Soul, Mind & the Body
- Plato and the Soul
- This is a dualist position. Nothing material is permanent. Plato sought certainty, and since it is not found in this constantly changing earth, it must be in another realm.
- Influenced by Pythagoras, Plato argues that the soul (psyche) and the body are different.
- The soul, Plato decided, is an immortal substance. It cannot be destroyed because it is simple and was not created.
- In the Phaedo, Plato writes about Socrates death: "the soul is the very likeness of the divine….the body is the very likeness of the human.”
- The soul is a perfect form trapped in a human body which is a temporary shell. refer to the chariot allegory in ‘Phaedrus‘.
- Gilbert Ryle
- Ryle fully rejects substance dualism, he used the term ‘ghost in the machine’ to describe Descartes’ theory, which says that we are the pilot of the body.
- Descartes has assumed that things must either be physical or mental, not both.
- The error in Descartes is that an action cannot be a whole body and mind thing, and Ryle’s problem is with the separation of the two.
- Aristotle and the Soul
- For Aristotle, we are people because our bodies are animated by the soul, the soul is the formal cause.
- Otherwise, humans are just matter. He believed the soul dies when the body dies and the person dies too.
- the soul does not travel to another world.
- Aristotle was a materialist: soul is not reducible to physics and chemistry, and matter needs the soul to be complete.
- Dualism vs Monism
- Dualism is a normal belief, but the problem with dualism is how the purely physical body can be influenced or directed by a spiritual soul, when the two are so different.
- There must be a link, the same way the mind feels the pain of the damage done to the body. when the body moves, the instructions go through the mind.
- Monism is the idea of ‘I am a body’, but with this there is no capacity for things like creativity, imagination and philosophical ideas because they go beyond the needs of a physical being and have no biological function. materialism is a possible version of this.
- Descartes
- Descartes’ theory is the most extreme person of the idea that the two are completely different substances.
- He ignores Aristotle’s work. he asks first if there is knowledge so certain that no one can doubt it.
- He notes how senses can be wrong, then wonders if everything is an illusion.
- He concludes that the only certain knowledge is ‘dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum’ = “i doubt, therefore i think, therefore i am” called the Cogito.
- He conceives the body as mechanical, with muscles like ropes and cables.
- John Hick
- For Hick, like Aquinas, our souls are not 'us.'
- He argues that death should be feared, because as a Christian, only God can bestow eternal life.
- Plato and the Soul
- He believes in ‘soft materialism’ we are our bodies, but they have a spiritual dimension and to be a person is to be a thinking material being.
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