Category: Soul and Body
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Mind-Body Dualism in Aquinas and Descartes: How Do They Differ?
Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle, views the soul as the form of the body. Anima forma corporis. Roughly, soul is to body as form is to matter. So to understand the soul-body relation, we must first understand the form-matter relation. Henry Veatch points out that "Matter and form are not beings so much as they are…
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What’s to Stop an AI System from having a Spiritual Soul?
John Doran in a comment presents an argument worth bringing to the top of the pile: A) Anything conscious has a non-material basis for such consciousness. B) Certain AI constructs [systems] are conscious. Therefore: C) Such AI constructs [systems] have a non-material component in which their consciousness resides. Why doesn't that work? It's obviously valid.…
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More on the Unity of Consciousness: From Self to Immortal Soul?
Suppose I see a black cat. The act of visual awareness in a case like this is typically, even if not always, accompanied by a simultaneous secondary awareness of the primary awareness. I am aware of the cat, but I am also aware of being aware of the cat. How does the Humean* account for…
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Am I a Body or Do I Have a Body?
Stack leader. Theme music. In his last book, Mortality, the late Christopher Hitchens writes, "I don't have a body, I am a body." (86) He goes on to observe that he has "consciously and regularly acted as if this was not true." It is a curious fact that mortalists are among the worst abusers of the…
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Soul Food
A Substack sermon.
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Soul as Homunculus? On Homuncular Explanation
The following quotation is reproduced verbatim from Michael Gilleland's classics blog, Laudator Temporis Acti: Augustine, Sermons 241.2 (Patrologia Latina, vol. 38, col. 1134; tr. Edmund Hill): They could see their bodies, they couldn't see their souls. But they could only see the body from the soul. I mean, they saw with their eyes, but inside there was…
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Soul Survivalism
Vita mutatur non tollitur.
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Jeffrey Long, M. D. on Near-Death Experiences (NDEs)
Here (under 5 minutes). 'Coded' as used by Dr. Long in this video clip is medical jargon. For a patient to 'code' is for the patient to suffer cardiac arrest. It is a mistake to think that if an episode of experiencing is real, then the intentional object of that episode of experiencing is also…
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Soul a Mere Life-Principle? How then Explain Conscience?
Aristotle, and following him Aquinas, thinks of the soul as the life-principle of a living body, that which animates the body's matter. A natural conception, but a dubious one, as it seems to me, one not up to the task of accounting for conscience. We humans are not just alive, we are also conscious both…
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Are the Souls of Brutes Subsistent?
Aquinas says No but his argument is inconclusive. Substack latest. Reader Zacary writes, I am just a layman who likes studying Aristotelian and Thomistic philosophy, and recently I haven’t been studying the issue of animals in the afterlife. I stumbled across your post from many, many years ago (all the way back in 2009!) that…
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A Test for the Religious Sensibility
You have it if these two books speak to you. Substack latest. With a bit of discussion of a recent book by Peter Kreeft on Augustine.
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Mortalism
Does the soul die with the body? Top o' the Stack.
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Four Attitudes Toward Embodiment
Am I ineluctably trapped in a dying animal? Is embodiment an axiologically negative state of affairs or is it an axiologically positive one? Here are four possible attitudes toward having a material body. They may be loosely associated, respectively, with the names Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Benatar. a) To exist is good, but it would be…
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De Anima
David K. writes, I need some help. I have been exploring the concept of the 'soul' over the last few months. I've meant it to be a fairly wide open review. I have 'rounded up the usual suspects' philosophically and worked my way through a great deal of the biomedical writings. Presently, I am in…