Key Themes 3: The Soul Flashcards
The substance dualist’s view
As far as Descartes, Plato, Swinburne and other substance dualists are concerned, the immortal, immaterial soul of religious belief is one and same as the mind. The immortality of the soul is central to the theory.
The behaviourist’s view
All talk of the soul must be considered meaningless and unacceptable, in the same way that the behaviourist cannot talk of minds and mental states. Talk of the soul’s survival beyond death is definitely meaningless and beyond scope of our language.
The physicalist’s view
As far as physicalists and advocates of MBIT are concerned, the soul is a myth. It should have been relegated to history by science. Indeed, even talk of the mind needs to be replaced (and will be replaced, as science advances) by talk of brain states defined by neuroscientists. The physicalist would be delighted if philosophers of mind could be replaced by neuroscientists: philosophy of mind is only being done by philosophers because science has not yet reached the level of sophistication to deal with it (although some philosophers, like Dennett, have started to engage extensively with neuroscience).
The Aristotelian view
Aristotle’s use of the Greek word psyché is usually translated as ‘soul’, although the way he uses the term is very different from that usually found in religion or in the writings of dualists. After all, he believes that all living things have souls, which are essentially that which is definitive of life. This seems a great deal less than what Christianity expects the soul to be. However, Aristotle does offer some hints that a part of the human soul might survive after death, but if this was the case, we would not survive death as complete selves. Aquinas solves this problem by invoking the idea of the resurrection of the body at the end of time, but this is obviously a claim based on faith rather than reason.
