A2 Revision

The distinction between the body and soul in the thinking of Plato, John Hick and
Richard Dawkins; other concepts of the body / soul distinction
Issues

Who am I? What gives me personal identity?

What is meant by the term body and soul?
How do the body and soul interact?
Does any part of me survive death? If so, how? Does my personal identity survive
the death process unchanged or am I given a new mode of being?

Definitions
Dualism that there exists both bodies and minds, distinct, but joined in some way
Materialism that a human being is purely physical, there is no separate soul.
Idealism that a human being is essentially mind, the body is an illusion.

Dualism

Materialism

Plato
Body/soul (psyche) distinction
Soul is simple; body is composite and
disintegrates (literally loses its integrity)
Analogy of the chariot
Plato believed soul would be born in a
new body (i.e. reincarnation)

MONISM
Aristotle
A holistic view, the body and soul are one
thing and therefore the soul is not
immortal
Psyche is the principle of life and the form
(gives characteristics)
Analogy of the lump of wax and stamp
form the wax

Descartes
Body and mind are separate but related
in the pineal gland
Similar to Plato but more subjective, what
reality is for the individual
His ideas were pushed to their limit by
Malebranche
(Occasionalism)
and
Leibniz (Pre-established harmony)
Parallelism
Epiphenomenalism
The mind and
Mental events are
body never
the effects of
influence each
physical events,
other but
but mental events
progress along
never cause
parallel paths
physical events.
Descartes inspired a shift to an emphasis on

Aquinas
Agrees with Aristotle (soul animates the
body) but says that the soul is immortal (and
therefore integrates Platos thought
Gilbert Ryle
Philosophical behaviourism as found in
book The Concept of the Mind
Famous attack on dualism, criticising
Descartes for promoting the idea of the
ghost in the machine
There is no separate entity called the
soul, cannot separate the mental and
physical parts of our existence. To do so
is a category mistake
Ryle is arguing that to talk of a distinction
is a linguistic mistake

individual self-consciousness
William Temple
Behaviourism
BF Skinner

However,
Vardy suggests that Hick does not take
seriously the distinction between the same
person and the replica; if God can create 1
replica he could create 20
Bernard Williams argues that if someone
claims to be Guy Fawkes, having the same
memories, 19 others could also claim to be
him; and yet they could not all logically be
Guy Fawkes
Donald Mackay

Logical
behaviourism
L Wittgenstein
Anti-Cartesian
Our thoughts are
bound
by
language

HARD MATERIALISM
Richard Dawkins
Biological materialism as found in The
Blind Watchmaker and River out of Eden
His attack is based on a dualist definition
of body and soul
Life amounts to bytes of digital
information contained in DNA
Soul is mythological and the invention of
primitive people
Humans are just a survival machine with
a program to replicate.
SOFT MATERIALISM
John Hick
Replica theory
He criticises the dualism of Plato and
Aquinas, drawing support from biblical
material
Proposes 3 scenarios to determine
whether the same person survives death.
Whilst odd, wants to show that it is
logically possible
Replica possible because of omnipotence
of God

Christian
Key issue for a Christian in this debate is that whatever is me must continue after I die;
so what is the real me?
In the history of Christian thought, both dualist (Swinburne, Popper) and holistic (Charles
Taylor) views have been held.
Man does not have a body, he is a body he is flesh-animated-by-soul, the whole
conceived as a psycho-physical unity (J A T Robinson)
1 Corinthians 15 physical resurrection of all believers, based on resurrection of Jesus
See John Hick
Charles Hartshorne
Our individual histories are stored in the divine memory (similarity to Hindu idea of
Brahman and atman?)