Soul, Mind, Body

• “When I drink the poison, I shall no longer remain with you, but shall go off and depart for some happy state of the blessed”
• Dualism: the view that the soul and body are two separate entities
• Emotion/spirit: Allows humans to love and be courageous. However, if left unchecked can lead us to be reckless & conceited.
• Appetite: Needed so we can look after the wants of our body, but again if left unchecked can lead to lives of hedonism
• In his Republic Plato had put forth a proposal on how society should run. Within this he had constructed three roles for the citizens of the republic: the Rulers, the Auxiliaries and; the Workers. The Rulers, which are philosophers, were superior to the others in society because they were the ones who could show complete devotion to the wellbeing of the community since it was only they who understood the importance of the role of reason and were able to avoid succumbing to the temptations of appetite. Link between tripartite soul to argument for philosopher kings.
• The Argument from Opposites

  Every quality comes into being from its opposite,or,at least it depends on its opposite to have any existence at all.

  E.g Big and small, Hot and Cold, Dark and light

  Plato postulated that life must come from death, and death must come from life in an endless chain of birth and death and therefore there must exist an immortal soul.
•  From a priori reasoning, Plato deduced that the opposite of death is life therefore, life and death must have a causal relationship with each other. This means that death must have the ability to cause life: life must come from death, and death must come from life in an endless chain of birth and death. In order for death (by definition the absence of anything) to cause something else, then there must be something that can survive bodily death. For Plato, that thing is the immaterial, eternal soul.
• The argument from knowledge

  In his text Meno, a slave boy with no education is given a geometry puzzle to solve. Through questioning, the boy is able to work out the problem which, to Plato, proved that the boy must have been using knowledge that he already had, before birth.
• a priori deduction through the example of the slave boy in Plato’s text Meno. Plato tells of a slave boy with no education who is given a geometry puzzle to solve by Socrates. Initially unable to do so, through questioning, the boy is able to arrive at the correct answer for the puzzle. For Plato, this was evidence of anamnesis, the process of the soul remembering knowledge of the forms. Therefore providing evidence for the existence of the soul and explaining it’s role which is to communicate knowledge of the forms to us via a difficult education
• The fundamental difference between a living body and a dead one, for Aristotle, is that the living body has capabilities and characteristics whereas the non-living body does not.
• "The soul is that which gives the matter its efficiency" - Aristotle
• To illustrate his postulate that the soul is that which gives living things the capability to achieve their telos. Aristotle gives an example of an axe. He states that if an axe were to have a soul, it's soul would be the thing that gave it the capability to  chop-this is because being able to cut things is what makes an axe an axe. A toy axe is not a real axe because it does not have the  capability to chop. The toy axe has a different telos therefore necessarily would have a different soul since it would require different  capabilities to reach this telos.
• Aristotle identified that all living things have a telos, but that their telos is different depending on what those things are. Subsequently he presented three different variations of soul
• Vegetative soul: the capacity to get nourishment for themselves and ensure reproduction of species
• Vegetative soul

   the telos of plants is to reproduce therefore the efficient cause which allows the material of the plant to  move towards this telos must provide the plant with the capacity to get nourishment for themselves & ensure the reproduction of species
• Perceptive Souls: Senses in which to experience the world. Can distinguish pleasure and pain.
• Perceptive Souls

  the telos of animals is also to reproduce. However, the capabilities provided by the efficient cause in  the vegetative soul would not provide animals with the adequate ability to do this. Therefore the perceptive soul includes all of  the capabilities of the vegetative soul in addition to the capability to have sense experience and to distinguish pleasure and pain
• Intellectual soul: Higher degree of the soul because they have the ability to reason and tell right from wrong.
• Intellectual soul

   Aristotle held that the telos of human life was to achieve eudaimonia – to flourish. Just like with the  perceptive soul, the human soul also holds the capabilities of the vegetative and perceptive soul but, in order for humans to  reach eudaimonia they will need to live according to the principles of virtue ethics. As such, their soul gives them the capability to  reason and make moral decisions.
• Wax Stamp Analogy

   In the same way that a stamp cannot be separated from wax, The soul and the body are intertwined and cannot be separated from each other.
• Aristotle used the analogy of a wax stamp, highlighting that the soul and the body are intertwined and cannot be separated, just like once the wax has been  imprinted with the stamp, it is not possible to remove it. This view makes Aristotle a monist meaning that he  believes the soul and the body to be inextricably linked. For this reason it is difficult for Aristotle to argue that  the soul can survive after bodily death although in his later works he does begin to question the possibility of an  afterlife, he himself is unclear on how this would work and what the role of the soul would be
• Monism: the view that the soul and body are inextricably linked.
• Sartre 

  Aristotle's views are based on the notion of telos. Participant of the existentialist thought, Sartre believed that existence precedes essence. Thus rejects the notion of a predetermined human purpose
• In his book The Meditations,  Descartes uses a priori reasoning to prove the existence of the soul. Descartes searches for the suitable foundation for the edifice of knowledge. “What if anything, can i know for certain?”. In order to do this, He undergoes the process of Hyperbolic doubt (doubting all prior knowledge).
• Hyperbolic doubt: extreme scepticism
• Descartes abandons empiricism, understanding that the senses can be deceived. 

  Example of sense deception:

  Descartes argues that beyond sense deception, senses can only ever lead a person provisional knowledge, as they can later be proved wrong and lead us to different conclusions.
• “I don't know that i'm not dreaming until I wake up."
• In The Meditations, Descartes describes a scenario where he is sitting in a room on an armchair, by the fire. Through his process of  hyperbolic doubt, he concludes that he cannot trust the knowledge that he gains empirically as his senses have deceived him in the past. Furthermore, he states that he cannot know with absolute certainty that he is in the room by the fire because he remembers times when he has been dreaming and thought those experiences to be real until he woke up.
• Descartes wonders about abstract concepts like mathematical truths, however, he is forced to admit that he can't get knowledge that is beyond doubt. He could not rule out that his mind was being manipulated by an evil demon, causing him to believe that mathematical truths were real. At this point, Descartes found that he cannot know, beyond doubt, any of his prior knowledge or experiences and he cannot be sure that anything he is seeing is real. He concludes that he cannot be certain that he has a body because he only knows about his body empirically and this  cannot lead to certain truth. 
• Cogito ergo sum
• Materialism: the mind and consciousness can be fully explained by physical or material interactions and therefore rejects the idea that the soul is a spiritual substance.
• "Belief in the soul is a philosopher’s myth"
• “There is no ghost in the machine”
• All human functioning can be described as ‘acts’ and that there is no division between mental and physical acts - they are the same.
•  a visitor to Oxford University. The visitor, upon viewing the colleges and library, reportedly inquired “But where is the University?" The visitor's error is presuming that Oxford University is part of the category "physical building” rather than that of an

  "institution" they have been incorrectly categorised. Along the same vein, Ryle argues that this is the same type of error that people make when they incorrectly categorise the function of the brain as the function of an immaterial soul.
• Ryle held that the traditional mind/body distinction was a category mistake because traditionally, people believed the mind & body to be two separate categories that were somehow harnessed together, but that is inconsistent with what we now know about psychology and neuroscience. Ryle argues that historically, when people didn't know better they categorised things like personality, behaviour and character as: the soul but, now we know more about the neuroscience it is clear that a mischaracterisation has been made and instead these things should be categorised as the brain.
• Ryle argues that people today who say that they have a soul are incorrect because they are employing a distinction that is a misuse of semantics. Language like ‘soul’ is therefore best understood metaphorically.
• Soul one : a distinctive spiritual and supernatural part of a person, capable of knowing God and surviving bodily death
• Soul two: a person's personality and individuality. 
• Rosalyn Weiss in 'The Virtue of the cave' presents a critique of the argument from knowledge. She posits that the farcical nature of the slave boy demonstration and permits it to be seen for what it really is: a lesson in geometry, with teacher, student and new material taught. (Socratic Method of Questioning)