Soul, mind & body

Question 1

Plato on the soul

Answer 1

• Plato is dualist:
• He believes that the soul and body are separate entities.
• body is temporary and soul is essential (the essence of someone)
• PHAEDO (book) Socrates presents Plato’s view of the immorality of the soul = having no beginning or end.
• its contemplation of the Form of the Good
• Socrates - soul lives on as thought and intelligence
• life comes from death, death comes from life

Question 2

The story of Meno

Answer 2

• In The Meno Plato tells the story of how Socrates proved that an uneducated slave boy could be prompted by a series of questions and some shapes drawn in the sand to figure out how to solve a geometry question.
• The slave boy must therefore have been born with geometric concepts

This shows..
- Boy must have had some knowledge despite his life giving him no education.
- Our intuitions are evidence of knowledge attained before birth

Question 3

The myth of Er

Answer 3

• Told through Socrates
• he discusses ideas of immorality of the end
• Er (the character) died and met judges
• Those who were good chose wisely, those who were bad, chose badly (E.G being a dictator) = only philosophers chose wisely.
• Er went back to educate his freinds (like the cave)

Question 4

Dualism

Answer 4

• belief in two seperate elements (body & soul)

Question 5

Greek word

Psyche

Answer 5

Greek word for mind/soul

Question 6

Aristolte 3 Types of souls

Answer 6

- vegetative: pants = Shared by all living things (growth and reproduction)

- Appetitive: animals and humans (emotion)

• Intellectual: unique to humans, reasoning and thinking

Question 7

Plato’s dualism

Answer 7

He believed the body was like a prison for the soul, trapping it in this world of appearances.

The charioteer analogy:
- It represents intellect, reason, or the part of the soul that must guide the soul to truth
- one horse represents the rational part of passionate nature
- while the other represents the soul’s irrational passions, appetites, or concupiscent nature (sexual desires)

Question 8

Plato’s argument from recollection

Answer 8

• The argument from recollection is one of Plato’s arguments for the existence of the world of forms and also the existence of the soul.
• In the world of forms there are perfect mathematical forms and perfect forms like the form of beauty and the form of justice.
• The consequence is that there must be a world of perfect and unchanging (immutable) forms
• It is not a distant or other world – it is the true reality.
• What we see (the world of particulars/appearances) is not the true reality. Everything we experience is a vague shadow of what it really is; a perfect form.

Question 9

Humes critic of the plato recollection

Answer 9

• He responds that we can actually create the idea of perfection in our minds even if we have never experienced it.
• We have to take our concept of ‘imperfect’ and simply concieve of its negation: ‘not imperfect’ to gain the concept of ‘perfect’.

Question 10

Aristotle’s view of the soul

Answer 10

• Aristotle is a materialist – thinks only one type of thing exists – material/physical things.
• But he still believes in a soul as part of our material body – the soul is the ‘form’ of the body.
• The soul is what gives our body rational thought.
  It’s not a separate thing to our body – it is the form of our physical body.
• Stamp in wax analogy – the body is like wax and the soul is like the imprint in wax left by the stamp.
  The imprint is not a separate unique thing itself – it is just the form the wax has. Same goes for the soul.

Question 11

Plato evaluation

weakness

Answer 11

• Plato misses the large link between the body and mind - e.g. its how we recognise each other, drugs impact our mind and therefore our body etc.
• E.G. links to the placebo effect
• not an empiricist approach = theres no evidence for the Forms - no eveidence for the soul

Question 12

Aristotle weaknesses

Answer 12

• not clearly a materialist or dualist so is criticised
• Kenny states ‘He is unclear about what happens to the soul”
• How can reason exist beyond a body? Seems to be a contradiction that body and soul are inseprable but rational thought can be seperated.

Question 13

aristotles strength

Answer 13

• dervived from studies of the natural world
• in line with Plato in tha the soul is more important than the body
• relies on empirical evidence

Question 14

Conscience: Key differences between humans and robots

Answer 14

• humans have consciousness
• subjective and self aware
• aware of our emotions

Question 15

Substance Dualism

Answer 15

• Mind and soul is seperate substances which both exists
• substance - a subject which has various properties, e.g. a property of a mug is that its breakable, waterproof etc
• pythagoras, socrates and Plato all are within this view
• ideas that people are more than just their bodies has been developed by most major world religion.

Question 16

Descartes dualist understanding of consciousness

1596

supporter of plato

Answer 16

• Most famous defence of dualism = a rationalists
• 17th century in the ‘scientic revolution’
• wanted philosophy to have the same cerainity as maths
• BOOK: Meditations and the passions of the soul
• he notes how sense experince can be mistaken
• this means that the material world and even the body might be an illusion
• ‘The body is divisble by nature,the mind is not’ - descartes =

Question 17

1900

Gilbern Rye - ‘Ghost in the machine’.

Crticsm of dualism (descartes)

Answer 17

• He argues that it is improper to seperate the mind and the soul, its a category mistake
• this is becasue it tries to treat the mind and body as if they are two different things of similar logic.
• his book: the concept of the mind, uses the term ‘ghost in the machine’ to critsic descartes = takes a materialist view
• He uses the example of a cricket match (All players have different tatics but their ‘team spirit’ is what makes the collective game, it is not something that is extra or seperate from game.) He thought, in the same way, the body was like a machine, as if we were physical machiences being operated by an invisble mind.
• descartes argues that the things we experience are either physical or mental but instead according to ryle, they are both (e.g. feelings are experience physically and mentally = PTSD)

Question 18

Richard Dawkins

Materialist views

Answer 18

• Rejected the notion of Descartes and Plato
• He acknowldges the mystery of consciousness = believing that science will find our answer to our DNA
• In his book the‘selfish gene’ he distiguishes the two types of soul:
  1. soul one: seperate substance found in our traditional thought
  2. soul two: intellectual and spirtual
  imagination power.
• He propse this to show that humans are nothing more than ‘survival machienes’.= “ survival madnesses - robot vehicle blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules know as genes”

‘ There is no spirit-driven life force..life is just bytes..of digital information’ = River out of Eden (1995)

Question 19

How could a materialist be criticised by a dualist? (Criticism of Descartes view)

Answer 19

• Descartes done nothing to show mind is a substance
• Anthony Flew (2001) = BOOK (‘Can you survive your own death’)
• It’s nonsensical to think of a soul outliving body
• compares it to the Cat slowly disappearing until nothing is left but a grin.

HUME: Says we are personally aware we are individual thinking beings, but this does not help us to understood how thinking different from our physical

Question 20

Evaluation

Is the concept of ‘soul’ better understood metaphorically or as reality?

Answer 20

• The possible problem with distinctions between the soul and the body could be because the soul is being taken too literally when applied to a human person.
• We can speak of a ‘soul’ metaphorically, such as “I put my heart and soul into this project!” Perhaps, then the whole concept of the ‘soul’ is better understood as a metaphor. Because then it avoids problems when the idea is taken literally, of exactly where the soul comes from.
• The problem with this is that it can be difficult to know how it’s meant to be understood. If it means different things to different people, there’s no way of telling whether either is correct.

Question 21

Evaluation

Is substance dualism a category error?

Answer 21

• According to Ryle, people who make adistinction between the mind and the body make a category error. As demonstrated in examples of Oxford University and the cricket match. = many people think of the mind and the body as distinct things is just the result of taking the metaphor of the ‘soul’ or ‘mind’ too literally.
• Others, however, would disagree. There’s a saying that ‘the whole is more than the sum of its parts’, and perhaps this is true of the human person. It could be argued a village is more than just the number of inhabitants and the buildings, but that there is also something extra, such as a community spirit, which are intangible (fixed/untouchable) but nevertheless part of what it means for a village to be a village. So someone who speaks of human beings as something more than just the physical body aren’t just making a mistake, but are trying to express something intangible which is nevertheless, real and important.