Mind, body & soul

MIND, BODY AND SOUL

A01

Monism: the view that we are 1 substance.

Dualism: the belief that we have 2 elements: body & soul. 

Materialism: the belief that the only substance is a material one. 

^ property dualism: only one kind of substance, which is matter, but that matter has two distinct kinds of properties: physical and metal. 

Emergent materialism: view that new properties emerge from physical matter as it becomes more complex, the mind and body are dif but not completely distinct- Mill

DUALISM:

1-Plato:

Dualist. Soul and body two separate entities. 

Soul has capacity to leave the body and move on after death, returning to the world of the forms.

Tripartite view of soul:

Made of 3 parts: reason, appetite and emotion. 

Analogy of two horses pulling a chariot- reason is the charioteer, guiding and directing the horses, and the horses are emotion and appetite, driving forth the chariot. We need reason. 

Plato: uneducated people can still use reason bc their souls have encountered issues & education before in the world of forms. 

3-Descartes: substance dualist

Practiced radical doubt/ Cartesian thinking. 

Asked what can we be sure of?= only our own existence. 

‘Cogito ego sum’ - ‘I think therefor I am’

^ thinking/ consciousness proves our own existence. 

We cannot trust out own senses (dreams, hallucinations, fever etc) so nothing exterior (to our own existence) can be proved.

 He creates the ‘mental’ and ‘physical’ realms, that we are both mind and body. – dualism. 

What are we? Mind with bodies or bodies with minds?

Concludes humans are: ‘a substance who’s whose essence or nature consists only of thinking’- so a mind with a body. 

Although, he considered the body and mind (for him a soul) to be deeply connected but separate entities. 

Animals are automatons: possibly his greatest weakness 

They cannot have souls bc that would mean ours are superior, bc we are the superior species. 

Wold this mean they are the same material? (if they did), seemingly impossible. 

Deleluze:

You are born many different people but die 1. 

Start with the capacity to develop into many different people. (Like Sylvia Plath’s fig tree analogy in The Bell Jar, ‘I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree’.)

The mind is separate- can become dif ppl but the body is the same, will always be the same, just change with age.

Materialism= reductionism. 

Hick: dualist

Replica theory. 

Separate entities but both necessary for me to be me.

Supported by Leibniz law: which says if 2 things are identical, then they are the same thing. 

MATERIALISM:

Materialism:

Denies the existence of a soul. 

There is a body & a Brian, consciousness is produced by the brain. 

2-Aristotle:

Disagreed with Plato.

The soul is a substance, meaning ‘essence’ or ‘real thing’ 

The soul is that which gives a living thing its essence. 

Not distinct from the body.- it has the capabilities that the body has to…