Soul, Mind and Body

Plato’s views on the soul

Substance dualist - the soul is immortal and lives on after we die. The soul is tripartite and it consists of:

Spirited / emotion - our will / virtues (horse 2)

Appetitive / desire - body’s needs (horse 1)

Rational / reason - intellectual / thinking - seeking truth (charioteer).

The body and soul are opposites. The body is a source of endless trouble and it is a burden as it has needs such as food and it experinces love and lust.

Aristotle’s views on the soul

Property dualist, soul dies with body. Called the soul a ‘psyche’. An axe cannot cut wood without a hand (the soul)

The body is constantly changing but the substance remains the same

Elements of the soul:

Vegetative 

• All living things

• Growth, reproduction 

Appetitive

• Animals and humans 

• Desires, urges and emotions

Intellectual 

• Unique to humans

• Reasoning, thinking, remembering, deciding

Body has no life - can only possess life with a soul

Descartes’ views on the soul

The only thing he knows is that he is a living, thinking being ‘I think therefore I am’

The material world and even my body might be an illusion.

This means the body and soul are wholly separate substances

Gilbert Ryle’s views on the soul

He calls dualism a ‘category mistake’

Gilbert Ryle, in The Concept of Mind, uses the term ‘ghost in the machine’ to criticise how Descartes describes his concept of the mind.

To be clear Ryle is an analytic philosopher, he is not attempting to create an alternative theory but providing conceptual clarity.

Oxford university analogy:

Foreign visitor goes to the different colleges, libraries, museums but then asks ‘where is the university’ - the university is a collection of individual parts not something separate 

(Also military parade and cricket)

Descartes assumes that things we experience are either physical or mental but instead, according to Ryle, they are both e.g. feelings are experienced both physically and mentally (think of PTSD). Does not offer a reason for these mental states.

In other words, Ryle is arguing that it is improper to separate the two –body and soul.

Aquinas’ views on the soul

‘The soul is not me but is the principle of life’

My life needs the body to be animated

The soul is not material

The body is necessary for me to be me

A person is composed of soul and body but the soul is not material and should be understood as the mind. It is not separate

“It is clear that man is not only a soul only, but something composed of soul and body. Plato, because he thought that sensation was simply a function of the soul, was able to maintain that man was a soul making use of the body.”

Property dualism - soul is intertwined and both cannot live without each other.

Peter Geach’s views on the soul

How can a disembodied soul see the Forms - this experience is linked to the body and senses - critical of Plato

He says it is a ‘savage superstition’ to think that we separate after death

Resurrection is the only meaningful way in which one can speak of life after death and he states this is based on the grounds that a person could not be meaningfully identified with a spiritual existence after death.

GEM Anscome view’s on the soul

‘Bodily act is an act of man qua spirit’ - the act of a human as a whole

A description of my bodily actions might describe how my body is working but not why it is working. 

Body and mind are needed

Someone points. The meaning of the gesture cannot be indicated by the gesture alone. What is the reason I am pointing at something? A disembodied soul cannot point. Pointing is an act of the human as a whole

Substance dualism

the philosophical view that the mind and body are composed of two fundamentally different substances

What is property dualism

Property dualism says that there is only one kind of substance (usually physical, like the brain or body), but this substance can have two kinds of properties, mental and physical properties.