Plato believed
that the should
existed before
the body
Humans remember
things from a previous
life before that of the
body
Such as our ability
to recognise
goodness and
beauty
Plato said that we
need to be liberated
from bodily needs to
contemplate our souls
Plato thought
philosophers
souls lived on in
a state of wisom
The soul is closer
to the forms
Plato sought permanence
and if it cannot be found in
this material world it must
exist in the realm of the forms
Adopted the
idea of the soul
as immortal
For Plato, death is
nothing to fear as
it is shaking off the
temporary body
Platos soul
ultimately desires to
get out of the
inferior body in
which it is trapped
Aristotle
For Aristotle, the
soul is not a simple,
immortal substance
as it was for Plato
When the light goes
out and the soul dies,
I go back to being a
lump of matter
There is no person left, the
idea that the soul goes to
another world is not part of
Aritstotle's understanding
Aristotle is more than
a materialist, the soul
is not reducible to
physics and chemistry.
Matter needs the soul
to animate it
Through the soul people
develop their character, the
soul is the thing that makes
a living thing what it is
The vegetative soul
Shared with all
living things,
including plants
The appetitive soul
in which we find
passions and appetites,
such as hunger, thirst
and sexual desire
The intellectual soul
Which is rational and
directive - thinks about
and decides things
Descartes
René Descartes represents
perhaps the most extreme
form of substance dualism
which is the idea that two
elements (mind and body)
are wholly different
substances
He begins his philosophical
work by asking whether there
is any knowledge so certain
that no one may doubt it
He notes how sense
experience may be mistaken.
This might mean that the
material world and even the
body might be an illusion
He concludes that the
cognito is the only
certain piece of
knowledge.
Gilbert Ryle (1900-76)
His best known work is 'the
concept of mind' which is
famous for its attempts to
refute substance dualism
as proposed by Descartes
Dawkins
Dawkins is a
materialist thinker,
he rejects any notion
of the disembodied
soul espoused by
Plato and Descartes
He finds no empirical
evidence for such an
entity and mocks
religious believers for
supporting the notion
Dawkins makes an
interesting distinction,
between what he calls
soul one and soul two
Soul one: is the separate
substance of much
traditional thought.
Dawkins rejects this notion
as primitive superstition.
Soul two: is intellectual and spiritual
power, higher development of the
moral faculties, feelings and
emotions. These are rooted in the
body and their precise nature is yet
to be scientifically explained
Dualism
The belief that we
have two elements -
the body and the soul
If this is true, a problem
remains of how the purely
physical body can be influenced
or directed by the spiritual soul
If my body is
hurt my
mind feels it
Just as it feels sensations of
hunger and thirst when my
body needs nourishment
Monism
The view that we
are one substance
not two
in this view, thinking is just
something that human bodies
do, just as the body of an
amoeba splits into two new
creatures
This view is not without problem.
Amoeba split for physical and
biological reasons, human
consciousness seems to have
capacities which go well beyond
those necessary for mere survival or
continuation of species