Mind, body and soul

Question 1

Soul

Answer 1

The spiritual immaterial part of a human being or animal regarded as immortal

Question 2

Mind

Answer 2

The element of a person that enables them to be aware of the world and their experiences, to think and to feel; the faculty of consciousness and thought

Question 3

Body

Answer 3

The physical structure, including the bones, flesh, and organs, of a person or an animal

Question 4

Dualism

Answer 4

The philosophical belief that there are two distinct parts to the human, a body and mind (Soul)

Question 5

Reason

Answer 5

The power of the mind to think, understand, and form judgments logically

Question 6

Monism

Answer 6

The idea that the mind/ soul and body are united

Question 7

Aristotle’s hierarchy of the soul

Answer 7

Aristotle’s idea that the soul has a variety of functions some of which are more important than others

Question 8

Nutritive soul

Answer 8

Found in plants: it makes the plant alive and governs the process of growth, assimilation of foodstuffs, sunlight, and water, and, in the flourishing stage, the reproduction of the plant

Question 9

Sensitive soul

Answer 9

The capacity of perception, including pleasure and pain; closely associated with it is sense-related desire; the desire for pleasant things, and the aversion to painful ones

Question 10

Rational soul

Answer 10

The soul that in the scholastic tradition has an independent existence apart from the body and that is the characteristic animating principle of human life as distinguished from animal or vegetable life

Question 11

Substance dualism/ Cartesian Dualism

Answer 11

Substance dualism is a variety of dualism in the philosophy of the mind which states that two sorts of substances exist: the mental and the physical. Substance dualism is a fundamentally ontological position: it states that the mental and the physical are separate substances with independent existence

Question 12

Hard materialism

Answer 12

The theory or belief that nothing exists except matter and its movements and modifications

Question 13

Reductionism

Answer 13

The belief that everything can be reduced to statements about physical bodies

Question 14

Behaviourism

Answer 14

The belief that all mental states are simply learned behaviours of bodies. To say that I feel sad or angry means that I am behaving sad or angrily

Question 15

Category error

Answer 15

Mistakenly treating something as being of one type when it is of a different sort. It would be a category error to treat a rhinoceros as a butterfly

Question 16

Plato on the soul

Answer 16

Plato was a dualist (Links to his differentiation between the world of the forms and the world of appearances)
The body= “The prison of the soul”

Question 17

Plato’s Tripartite soul

Answer 17

1 The mortal horse is deformed and obstinate - Appetite/ desires makes us look after the physical needs of our bodies, but can lead to hedonism
2 The immortal horse, is noble and game - Emotion, gives us the ability to love, be courageous but can lead to recklessness
3 The charioteer, guiding and harnessing them to propel with strength and efficiency. The charioteer’s destination? The ridge of heaven, beyond which he may behold the forms - Reason helps us work out right from wrong, helps us see the world of forms, and helps us gain knowledge

Question 18

Aristotle’s view of the soul

Answer 18

Its form was within the structure itself.
The soul and body are an inseparable unit
The soul is the first actuality of a natural body that potentially has life (If the body were an axe, the soul would be its ability to chop)

Question 19

Descartes view on the soul/ Cartesian Dualism

Answer 19

Each person is composed of two main parts: an immaterial mind and a physical body
Only immaterial minds can have mental properties
Only physical objects can have physical properties
Mind and body are able to exist independently
Mind and body enter into two-way casual interaction. This being through the pineal gland

Question 20

Dawkins

Answer 20

Humans are merely carriers of information and DNA
Distinguishes between soul 1 and soul 2
Soul 1- the traditional view of a principle of life, a real separate thing that is spiritual and contains personality- Dawkins rejects this
Soul 2- as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary refers to “Intellectual or spiritual power. The high development of the mental faculties, Deep feeling and sensitivity”
The soul is simply a metaphor for our intellect and feelings
Human self-awareness is not due to the soul but has developed because self-awareness has evolutionary advantages
Consciousness is no more than electro-chemical events within the brain and that no person is capable of surviving brain death. Therefore physical death is the end and the soul does not exist in any other way than a metaphor

Question 21

Gilbert Ryle

Answer 21

The myth of dualism is the result of a type of mistaken thinking which he calls a “Category error”
University visitor analogy - Has mistakenly assumed that …is some separate entity existing apart from all its constituents. But it is not some separately existing alongside …it stands for the entire collection. So too Gilbert Ryle contends, the “Mind” should not be thought of as some separate entity in the same category as the body or the brain.

Question 22

Leibniz law

Answer 22

If two objects are identical they have to have exactly the same properties; so if objects A and object B don’t both have a certain property then they must be different

Question 23

The metaphysics of consciousness:

the following aspects of consciousness are interesting and require an explanation

Answer 23

1 Logical privacy- no one other than me can know my thoughts. I cannot know the thoughts of others
2 Subjectivity- My conscious experiences are from a first-person point of view
3 Qualia- this is a term used by philosophers to describe how an experience feels to the person who has the experience
4 Non-spatial- although materialists may dispute this, it would seem that our consciousness does not take up physical space

Question 24

Descartes identifies differences between mind and body

Answer 24

1 Descartes argues that the Cogito enables him to identify the essential nature of the mind and this is that it is a “Thinking thing”. The essence of the mind is thought, which is non-physical
2 The was an argument- the essential nature of physical matter and this is that it is extended (Occupies space)
3 Physical thing can be divided into sections or parts, something that has no physical location cannot be divided

Question 25

Property dualism

Answer 25

This theory accepts that there is only one substance, the physical brain, but maintains that there are two types of properties: mental and physical. They differ from materialists such as Dawkins as they argue that mental properties such as having a thought or experiencing pain cannot be reduced to a specific location in the brain even though they are caused by the brain.

Question 26

Materialism

Answer 26

The belief that only physical matter exists, and that the mind can be explained in physical terms as chemical activity in the brain

Question 27

What is the mind-body question?

Answer 27

This is a meta-physical question, metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that deals with huge questions about what exists, and the essential nature of things

Question 28

Aquinas: The first principle of life

Christian Monism

Answer 28

“The soul which is the first principle of life”

The mind and the body are two separate things

The mind is INCORPOREAL, the body is CORPOREAL

The mind is reliant on the body and the body is reliant on the mind. (Animate)

Aquinas on life after death:
Aquinas believed in a full-body resurrection as the body has to be there as it is needed for the mind to function.

Question 29

Descartes

“Res extensa”

Answer 29

Res extensa- Requires something else to move it

Body

Question 30

Descartes

“Res congitans”

Answer 30

Res congitans- has no place in the spacio temporal world

Mind

Question 31

Cambridge illustration

Category error

Answer 31

A foreign visitor wnt to Cambridge to see the sights he is shown all the different colleges, the museum, the library and so on. At the end of the tour, he asks his guide: “But where is the University of Cambridge?”

Question 32

John Hick’s understanding of the soul in Christianity

Answer 32

“Soft materialism” - My soul is not me

We are our bodies, but these bodies have a spiritual dimension

There is no mind without matter

To be a person = to be a thinking material being. Hick was against the idea that to die is something not to be feared.

Question 33

G.E.M Anscombe: “Man qua spirit”

Answer 33

Believed that, a description of my bodily actions might fully describe how my body is working, but not why it is working

This bodily act is an act of “man qua spirit”, the act of a human as a whole

My body does the act however that would be impossible if I where not a body, a disembodied soul could not act on its own

Question 34

B.F Skinner

applying behaviourism to the mind-body question

Answer 34

Mental acts are cause acts, explicable at a physical level.

Question 35

Daniel. C. Bennett

applying behaviourism to the mind-body question

Answer 35

There is something more to human consciousness than something simply explicable as a material cause-and-effect what that something is, remains unclear.