Soul mind body

• Soul

  The essential and immaterial part of a human
• Disembodied


  Not in body, the soul goes to the noaton (the world of forms) after death
• Embodied


  In body, the soul is reborn into a new physical body after death
• Parts of the soul (Plato)

  • Rational (thinking, truth-seeking)
  • Spirited (will, virtues, personality)
  • Appetitive (bodily needs, greed)
• Charioteer


  The rational element of the soul, in control of the other elements
• White horse


  The spirited element of the soul, leading the charioteer up to the noaton
• Black horse


  The appetitive element of the soul, linked to the body's needs, dies when the body dies
• Plato is extremely negative about the body, seeing it as a burden and hindrance to the soul
• Reasons Plato gives for disliking the body

  • Constantly requires food
  • Filled with fears and foolery
  • Diseased and ill
  • Filled with loves and lusts
• Dualism


  The belief that there are two separate elements - body and soul
• Materialism


  The belief that there is only a material substance, no soul
• Monism


  The belief that there is only one substance, not two
• Reductionism


  Reducing everything to statements about physical bodies
• Behaviorism


  The idea that mental states are simply learned behaviors
• Cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am)


  Descartes' conclusion that the only thing he can be certain of is his own thinking mind
• Descartes doubted the existence of the external world and even his own body, concluding that the only thing he could be certain of was his own thinking mind
• Descartes was a substance dualist, believing in two separate substances - mind and body
• At the end of the day, it's our senses that tell us that other people exist, not our thinking mind
• We cannot know what others are thinking, so do we really know that they exist?
• The film Inception explores the idea of dream worlds and whether we can ever be certain that we are awake
• Descartes argues that the body and soul are wholly separate substances, and that the mind is not divisible like the body
• Descartes believes


  The body can be affected but the mind stays the same
• Gilbert Ryle criticises Descartes' dualism as a 'category mistake'
• Category mistake


  • Mistakenly treating something as being of one thing or one type when it's of a different type
• Examples of category mistakes

  • Asking where the university is when it's a collection of colleges, libraries, and museums
  • Asking when the division will arrive when it's a collection of units
  • Asking where the team's spirit is when it's the collective game
• Ryle argues that Descartes makes a category mistake by separating the body and soul into two separate categories
• Peter Geach criticises dualism as a 'savage superstition'
• Savage superstition

  An unfounded, illogical idea that the body and soul come apart at death
• Geach argues that Plato and Descartes have given this superstition an undeservedly long lease of life through conceptual confusion
• Geach's wife, G.E.M. Anscombe, argues that bodily acts are acts of the whole human being, not just the body or just the soul
• Problem of interactionism


  How can an immaterial soul influence a material body, and vice versa?
• Examples of the body and mind interacting

  • Feeling pain from a phantom limb
  • Feeling hunger and thirst from bodily needs
• Siddhartha Gautama recognised that the mind cannot reach enlightenment without nourishing the body
• Darren Brown demonstrates that the mind can control the body's physical sensations to some extent
• Aristotle argues that the soul is the 'formal cause' that gives the body its shape and nature
• The body is needed to help the mind
• It is possible to have mind over matter, where the mind can still control the body
• With training, it is possible to turn the mind off from the body
• Formal cause


  Gives something its shape and nature
• Soul


  The formal cause of a human, animating the body