Soul, Mind and Body Flashcards
what is mind/body problem?
-People always ask the question, who am I?
-Are humans physical entities or do they have a ‘mind’ and ‘soul’?
-If so what are the relationships between these?
-This is the Mind-Body problem or the difference between a dualist view, a monist view and a materialistic view.
what is monism?
Monism or materialism is the view that humans are made up of only a single (material) substance.
Pre-Socractic philosophers are described as monistic.
what are the two types of monism?
Idealistic monism argues that only the mind exists, the external and physical world is an illusion created by the mind.
Materialistic Monism argues that only single reality is matter. Emotion is a physical state and does not exist outside physical reactions.
What is materialistic monism?
Materialistic monism aka behaviourism says that all mental states are simply descriptions of behaviour that can be observed. Thoughts and emotions are processes of the body and we have no mind or soul.
what did Paul Churchland argue?
Paul Churchland argued that there is no convincing evidence that proves humans are more than physical matter. What we call the mind or soul is just brain activity.
what do dualists believe?
The main dualists are Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas and Descartes
Dualists believe that human beings are made of two substances- a physical substance (the body) and an immaterial substance (soul or mind).
Plato’s dualism?
His ideas surrounding dualism are found in his dialogue, the Phaedo which is set on the last days of Socrates’ life. Socrates taught that the soul is trapped in the body, like a prisoner. The soul can gain true knowledge. Socrates did not fear death as his soul was going to be freed from his body and then be able to gain full knowledge of the eternal forms.
Plato argues that everything comes into existence through its opposite; an educated person was previously uneducated, and an adult was previously a child.
In the same way, a person who is alive was previously dead meaning there is a constant chain of birth, death and rebirth. This cycle is called the immortal soul.
In another dialogue, Meno, Plato questions an uneducated slave on geometry that he couldn’t have known the answers to. Therefore the information or answers must have been recollected from the boy’s previous life, the soul was in the previous life and therefore is immortal.
A soul cannot change. Whereas everything in the world changes.
“Soul is most similar to what is divine, immortal, intelligible, uniform, indissoluble, unvarying and constant in relation to itself.”
difficulties with Plato’s dualism?
1) Plato switches from comparative terms at the beginning of his argument (eg smaller and larger, slower and faster) to absolute opposites (eg dead or alive) in the second part of his argument. Critics would call this a fallacy of equivocation.
2)One of the characters in the Phaedo argued with Socrates about the soul and recollection. He said the theory of recollection proves that the soul exists before birth but not after death.
3) Plato thought there was a fixed amount of souls, at the time most of Europe was undiscovered. How would Plato account for the ‘extra’ souls?
What was Aristotle’s dualism?
- The soul is present in all living things, not just humans, and it is not immortal.
- It is the essence or substance of each existing thing.
- The soul distinguishes between life and death, acting as the life force of all beings.
- There are three types of soul: the nutritive (found in plants, enabling growth and reproduction), the sensitive (in animals, allowing movement, perception, and reaction to stimuli), and the rational (in humans, with the capacities of the other two plus the ability to think and make moral judgments).
- The soul is not a body, but it is associated with and present within a body.
- It is not a material substance and cannot exist separately from the body.
- The soul is the ‘form’ of the body, meaning it gives structure and organisation to it.
difficulties with Aristotle’s dualism?
1) Too quick to dismiss Plato’s theory of forms due to a lack of empirical evidence.
2)Led a great deal of importance on causality, that everything has a cause and therefore has a final cause (purpose). Many would say the only purpose of the universe is to simply exist.
3)He says that everything in the universe has a cause to come into existence except the unmoved mover which has no cause for existence. This contradiction defeats his own argument.
Aquinas on the soul?
‘The soul is the first principle of life in all living things.’
The body is material; the soul is immaterial.
The body is corruptible; the soul is incorruptible.
The soul can exist without the body but the disembodied soul cannot do what it is natural for it to do.
The human soul called intellect or mind, is something incorporeal and subsistent.
Descartes and substance dualism?
- Descartes believed people could be deceived by sense experience.
- He proposed three waves of doubt: the possibility of an evil demon deliberately misleading perceptions, the idea that everything could be an illusion or dream, and the uncertainty of any knowledge except for one’s own existence (“cogito ergo sum”).
- Descartes concluded that while he couldn’t doubt his own existence as a thinking being, he couldn’t be certain about having a physical body.
- He argued that the mind and body are separate and distinct substances, with the body being divisible and the mind not.
- Descartes was concerned with how the non-physical mind could affect the physical body, which contradicted scientific principles.
- He suggested that the pineal gland in the brain might be where the soul interacts most directly with the body, believing the soul is joined to the entire physical body.
Gilbert Ryle and the “Ghost in the Machine”
He ridicules Descartes’s concept by calling it ‘the ghost in the machine’
He calls it a ‘Category Error’
Ryle’s point is that Descartes is guilty of category error because he assumes that mental events and physical events are the same type of thing.
Ryle believed that there is a mind but it is not separate from the human being, it is just me.
Materialism?
Rejected any suggestion of the supernatural, of an immaterial soul or God or life after death.
Developed the theory of atomism; nothing can exist other than (physical) atoms- no soul, no mind, no immaterial substance.
Richard Dawkins
He is a biological materialist, who believes that humans are made up of only physical attributes.
He looks at two definitions of the soul: ‘soul one’ being ‘non-physical vital principle, animated by some anima. Vitalised by a vital force. Energised by some mysterious energy. Spiritualised by some mysterious spirit.’ - he argues that this argument is circular and therefore useless.
‘Soul two’ being ‘intellectual/spiritual power. High development of mental faculties.’
He says soul two is an ‘awakening imagination’ of the human spirit, a spirit in who ch all humans have because they are human.
Soul two is like an idea of qualia
People criticise him because he uses a non-technical definition of the soul to base his argument and he begins from a closed viewpoint, he is biased as he is prejudiced against religious views and therefore dismissed it as being meaningless.
