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Advantages
- Plato-dualist-argued that life beyond death must exist. Plato said that the body was composite, and therefore capable of perishing, whereas the mind was simple and therefore imperishable. He believed that the soul belonged to a higher state of existence, known as the World of Forms. Plato therefore concluded that it is seemingly natural for the soul to carry on after the physical body has perished.
- Swinburne-the soul can exist without the body; he talked about how when the body is divided-our soul and self is not. For him, it is plausible to have a disembodied existence after death.
- Aquinas- developed the idea that the soul is what makes the body live; he referred to this as the anima. Aquinas understands the soul to be a ‘life force’, and it is what keeps our physical bodies alive. At death, the anima departs the body and continues to live on, taking our personal identity with it.
- Descartes- developed the idea of empirical scepticism-doubting one’s own physical existence. His point was that he could doubt he had a body, but not doubt that he exists. This lead him to the assumption that simply because we can doubt something, it does not necessitate it’s non –existence.
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Disadvantages
- Dawkins- theory of biological materialism. Dawkins theory can be explained using the analogy of a computer; it holds amounts of DNA, mere bytes of digital information. Dawkins said, “The genetic code is not a binary code as in computers, nor an eight-level code as in some telephone systems, but a quaternary code with four symbols. The machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-life”. Although Dawkins does not believe we are the same as computers, he notices that they are very close to how life operates.
- Ryle-argues against Descarte- alleged that it was a mistake to treat the mind as an object made of an immaterial substance because predications of substance are not meaningful for a collection of dispositions and capacities. He gives an analogy of the colleges of Oxford or Cambridge University making up the whole university to explain his point.
- St. Paul- makes a clear distinction between soul (‘psyche’) and spirit (‘pneuma’) in Thessalonians 5:23
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