PHIL 209: Mind, Soul, and Personal Identity Flashcards

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering Plato's Phaedo, Descartes' Meditations, Jaegwon Kim's Pairing Problem, John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and Thomas Reid's Objections.

Death (Socrates' Definition)

The freeing or separation of the soul from the physical body.

Purification (Plato)

The process of separating the soul from the body as much as possible, habituating her to gather and collect herself alone by herself, released from body bonds.

Dualism

The philosophical position that human beings consist of both a physical self (body) and a non-physical self (soul).

The Soul (Platonic)

The core essence and identity of a person that is simple, non-composite, immutable, persistent, and whose core function is thinking and engaging in rational activity.

Empiricism

An epistemological view stating that knowledge is acquired through empirical observation and sense perception of the world around you.

Rationalism

An epistemological view holding that at least some knowledge is acquired through reason alone without the aid of the senses.

Intelligible Realm

The fully real, knowable realm of Forms characterized by perfection, immutability, simplicity, standard beauty, and immateriality.

Realm of Appearances

The sensible realm that is less real, mutable, visible, material, imperfect, and made of composite physical things that participate in the Forms.

The Affinity Argument

Plato's proof for immortality claiming that the human soul is immortal because it resembles the invisible, unchanging, uniform, and eternal Forms.

Particular vs. Universal

A particular is an individual instance of something, whereas a universal is a general concept or form (such as triangularity, $a^2 + b^2 = c^2$) that applies broadly.

Simmias' Lyre Objection

A counter-argument suggesting the soul is like the harmony of a lyre, which perishes once the physical instrument is broken.

Cebes' Weaver Objection

A counter-argument comparing the soul to a weaver who outlasts many coats (bodies) but eventually perishes before the final coat.

Foundationalism

Descartes' methodological approach of using radical doubt to undermine weak foundational beliefs so that what remains is indisputably certain.

Evil Demon Hypothesis

A thought experiment supposing a malevolent, powerful, cunning demon deceives us about external reality, sensory experiences, and mathematical truths.

Cogito Ergo Sum

Descartes' foundational certainty ('I think, therefore I am'), establishing that one must exist in order to be deceived or to doubt.

Thinking Thing (Res Cogitans)

An unextended, immaterial substance whose essence is thought, including doubting, understanding, affirming, denying, wanting, refusing, imagining, and sensing.

Wax Argument

Descartes' demonstration showing that physical bodies are perceived and understood by intellect alone, not by sensory qualities which change when exposed to fire.

Extension (Res Extensa)

The defining essence of material bodies or physical substance, occupying space and having geometry, size, and divisibility.

Claram (Clear Perception)

A perception that is present and accessible to an attentive mind.

Distinctam (Distinct Perception)

A perception so sharply separated from all other perceptions that every part of it is vivid (clarum).

Material Falsity

A condition where an idea is false in the sense that it represents a non-thing as if it were a real thing.

Pineal Gland

The brain structure postulated as the 'common sense' faculty where unmediated mind-body causal interaction takes place.

Reflexive Certainty

The state in which the mind relates directly to itself through introspection, making it impossible to be self-deceived about one's own conscious experience.

Cartesian Substance Dualism

The philosophical view that the world consists of two fundamentally distinct substances: unextended thinking mind and extended physical body.

Conceivability Argument

Descartes' argument that since it is conceivable and logically possible to exist without a body, the mind is not identical to the body.

Materialism

The philosophical view that human beings are purely physical/material entities and the mind is identical to the body or nervous system.

Three Levels of Skepticism

Descartes' progression of doubt starting with sensory perception, moving to dreaming, and culminating in the evil demon hypothesis.

Mental Causation

The causal interaction between non-physical mental events/souls and physical body events.

Causal Pairing Problem

The challenge raised by Jaegwon Kim regarding how a nonspatial, unextended soul can be causally paired with a specific physical body without spatial relations.

Pairing Relation (R)

A relation that uniquely connects a specific cause to its specific effect to explain why cause A produces effect A* rather than effect B*.

Impenetrability of Matter

The principle that physical space provides a criterion of individuation, meaning two material objects occupying the exact same spatial region are identical.

Nonspatial Mental Substance

An entity or soul conceived as existing entirely outside physical space, unable to possess spatial location, distance, or orientation.

Nonphysical Coordinate System

A hypothetical non-physical framework that would be required to give immaterial mental substances unique locations to solve the pairing problem.

Continuous Causal Chain

One of the standard methods for resolving pairing in physical causation by tracing spatial-temporal pathways from cause to effect.

Spatial Relations

Physical parameters such as distance and orientation that serve as pairing relations in material causation.

Anthony Kenny's Challenge

The question of how an unextended thinking substance can cause motion in an extended unthinking body, and vice versa, given their diverse categories.

Personal Identity (Locke)

The persistence of a person over time, defined by sameness of consciousness rather than sameness of substance or body.

Sortal Terms

Terms (such as 'person', 'man', or 'substance') that denote the kind to which a thing belongs and determine its specific identity criteria.

'Man' (Locke's Definition)

A living animal of a specific human form and shape, whose identity consists in biological continuity and participation in one continuous life.

'Person' (Locke's Psychological Definition)

A thinking, intelligent being endowed with reason and reflection that can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing in different times and places.

Psychological Criterion

The principle that X is the same person as Y if X's psychological states exhibit continuity with or remember the experiences of Y.

Forensic Term

Locke's characterization of 'person' as a legal and moral term linked to moral agency, responsibility, rewards, punishments, and prudential reasoning.

Moral Agent

An active, intelligent being capable of performing moral actions that can be judged as right or wrong and held accountable.

Prudential Reasoning

Rational, self-interested deliberation involving self-concern for one's future happiness or misery.

Prince and the Cobbler

Locke's thought experiment demonstrating that if a prince's consciousness transfers to a cobbler's body, he is the same person as the prince but a different man.

Individuation (Locke)

Existence itself, which ties a being of a given sort to a particular time and place that cannot be shared by any other being of the same kind.

Mass of Matter Identity

An identity condition where sameness depends strictly on having the exact same parts; adding or removing particles creates a different mass.

Plant/Oak Identity

An identity condition determined by an organization of parts in one body partaking in the same continuous, uninterrupted life, despite changing particles.

Locke on Reincarnation

The view that punishing a reincarnated person who lacks consciousness/memory of past lives for prior deeds is unjust, equivalent to being born miserable.

Reductio Ad Absurdum

A logical method of proving a claim false by assuming it to be true and deriving an absurd consequence or contradiction.

Brave Officer Paradox

Reid's counter-argument showing that if a general remembers being a war hero, and the hero remembers being a boy, but the general forgets the boy, Locke's theory creates a logical contradiction.

Transitivity of Identity

The logical principle stating that if A = B and B = C, then A = C.

Reid's Transitivity Objection

Thomas Reid's demonstration that memory is not a transitive relation, whereas identity is strictly transitive.

Circularity Objection (Reid)

Reid's criticism that Locke's memory theory is circular because memory presupposes personal identity rather than creating it.

False Memories Problem

A problem for Locke's memory criterion where deriving identity purely from memory claims fails if memories can be mistaken without prior identity.

Consciousness (Reid's Definition)

The mental faculty providing immediate knowledge of present thoughts and actions.

Memory (Reid's Definition)

The mental faculty providing immediate knowledge of past actions and experiences.

Testimony vs. Thing Testified

Reid's distinction emphasizing that memory/consciousness is evidence (testimony) of identity, and claiming testimony causes the event is absurd.

Continuous Existence Criterion

Reid's principle that personal identity can only be affirmed of things that have a continuous existence, unlike momentary, flowing thoughts.

Sameness of Kind vs. Sameness of Individual

Reid's observation that if identity consists in fleeting consciousness, people share only a similarity of kind across time, not individual numerical identity.