Soul, mind, and body Flashcards
Soul, mind, and body - The soul
> Soul is a difficult word to define - used loosely.
Sometimes soul and mind can be used interchangeably.
Often used to refer to the ‘self’ or essential part of the person. Christians - soul is the most important part of a person, soul is non-physical, is capable of a relationship with God, and can live independently of the body.
Soul, mind, and body - Plato’s ideas
> Dualist - soul and body as two separate things.
Soul has the capacity to leave the physical body and live on after death.
Demands of the body can impede progress of the soul.
Life and death come from each other as an endless chain where souls are reborn.
Tripartite view - reason, appetite, and emotion.
Analogy of the chariot.
Uneducated people can still work out answers to geometry and logic problems as they encountered them before in the world of the forms.
Soul, mind, and body - Aristotle’s ideas
> Disagreed with Plato
Soul was a substance.
Gives a living thing its essence, the capabilities of living things constitute their souls.
Soul is not distinct from the body.
Gives bodily matter its form, efficiency, and telos.
Analogy of the wax and stamp.
Soul, mind, and body - Substance dualism
> Mind and body are two distinct substances.
Body is material - has properties of extension (takes up space, has measurements)
Mind/soul is immaterial - has properties of thought and emotion.
Descartes arrived at this view through hyperbolic scepticism. He couldn’t be certain he had a body but he could be certain that he had a mind ‘I think therefore I am’ If we can be certain of the mind but not the body they must be separate.
Thought the mind and body must be attached somehow (pineal gland) but was hazy about how this worked.
Allows the possibility of life after death.
Soul, mind, and body - Property dualism
There is only one kind of substance, matter, but that matter can have two distinct properties: physical and mental.
Soul, mind, and body - Emergent materialism
New properties emerge from physical matter as it becomes more complex, mind and body are different but not completely distinct, (View of John Stuart Mill)
Soul, mind, and body - Reductive materialism (identity theory, type physicalism)
> The mind is not distinct from the body but is identical with it.
Mental states correspond to different activities in the brain.
Chemical reactions are the same things as mental events, not just caused by them.
Doesn’t allow for life after death.
Soul, mind, and body - Gilbert Ryle: The Concept of Mind (1949)
> Mind is not a distinct part of the body but an aspect of the way that the body behaves.
No ‘ghost in the machine’ - no non-physical ‘soul’ in the matter of the body. Thinking of the mind and body as distinct involves a ‘category mistake’.
Soul, mind, and body - Richard Dawkins: The Selfish Gene (1976) and River Out of Eden (1995)
> Humans are entirely material - survival machines.
Rejects the idea that we need to think of a supernatural soul if we are explaining what it means to be human.
Calls Platonic ideas ‘soul one’ and Aristotlean ideas as ‘soul two’
Soul, mind, and body - Criticisms of dualist approaches
> Our experience of ourselves doesn’t seem to support a dualist approach - we find ourselves to be a unity with mental and physical aspects (feeling /=/ truth)
Approaches cannot explain how the mind and body work together.
The ‘problem of other minds’ arises - how can we be certain that other people have minds if they are completely separate from the physical bodies that we perceive.
Distinction between mental and physical properties is nto always clear cut.
Soul, mind, and body - Criticisms of materialist approaches
> The way we use language suggests that we feel ourselves to be more than just a physical body (feeling /=/ truth).
Descartes’ observation that the mind and the body have different properties and therefore cannot be the same substance is a valid point.
Materialism cannot explain a chemical reaction can cause consciousness and mental events.
Swinburne and Ward argue that losing belief in the soul could have a damaging effect on ethics.
