A Brief Guide to Ideas : Turning Points in the History of Human Thought - Softcover

William Raeper; Linda Smith

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0745939090 ISBN 13: 9780745939094

Publisher: Lion Publishing, 1997

Synopsis

A popular introduction to the history of Western religion and philosophy, this volume contains information on all familiar names in the fields as well as more obscure contributors to the broad scope of intellectual pursuit.

About this title

About the Author

The late William Raeper was a writer and teacher based in Oxford. Linda Edwards and William Raeper together wrote the highly successful textbook 'Luke: A Gospel for Today.'

Linda Edwards (M.A., Oxford University; M.Ed., Nottingham University) is visiting lecturer at Trinity College, Carmarthen, Wales, and a freelance writer and educational consultant. Together with the late William Raeper, she is author of Luke: A Gospel for Today.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 4 The Nature of the Soul Aristotle and Identity Who are you exactly? That might seem a strange question, but have you ever suddenly caught sight of yourself in a mirror and wondered for a second who it is you are looking at? You can see a familiar face but just for a second you wonder who or what it is that makes you yourself apart from your body. Once we start thinking about ourselves in this way all sorts of questions arise: * Who am I exactly? * How do I know who I am? * How can I know I'm the same person today as I was yesterday? * What is it in me that causes me to be alive? * Do I have a soul which survives my body after death? Plato and the person In Platonic thought a person is part of the physical world in that he or she has a body through which sense-impressions can be received. But at the same time he or she has an immaterial mind which is capable of knowing eternal truths beyond the world. There is also a directing force, the soul, which Plato pictures as a chariot rider, which is guiding and being guided by two horses, mind and body. The mind wants to travel into the heavenly realm of the ideas and to understand them; the body wants to be involved in worldly matters to do with the senses. The human soul is caught between these two opposing forces. The soul is trying to steer but is trapped in the prison of the body. Therefore, according to Plato, people have no real freedom if their lives are concentrated on physical requirements. However, your soul can free itself from this bondage and direct your life, both your physical circumstances and your intellectual pursuits. But it is only after bodily existence that the soul rises upward to the eternal world of Ideas. For Plato soul and body are two different things. The soul is immortal; it inhabits the body temporarily. Aristotle and the soul Aristotle's idea of the soul is very different from Plato's. In his account On the Soul, Aristotle gives a general account of what he believes a soul is. He follows the belief common to the Greeks that the soul is the principle of life: inquiry into the soul is enquiry into the different forms of life. The basic form of life is found in plants, which feed themselves, grow, decay and reproduce. So the basic form of soul consists in the ability to do these things; all forms of life manifest this. The word 'soul' then, simply describes how something is alive in the world. A 'soul' is not necessarily separate from the body or eternal. On the contrary, a 'soul' is what gives a body life. With animals there is the additional capacity for sense-perception, and in most of them the capacity for movement. For Aristotle oak trees and ostriches had psyche (or 'soul') as much as monkeys or men. The word 'soul' did not mean the same as 'mind'. Rather everything that lives has psyche, but human beings are at the top of creation. It is this hierarchical arrangement which makes it difficult to say that Aristotle had one single definition of the soul. A soul is what makes a body work. These souls are not bits of special spiritual stuff which have been placed inside the living body. They are sets of powers, capabilities and faculties. For Aristotle, to have a soul is like having a skill; it is not a part of you which functions independently from any other part. He wrote: 'One should not ask if the soul and the body are one, any more than one should ask it of the wax and the shape, or in general of the matter of anything and that of which it is the matter.' In Aristotle's thinking there is no problem about how soul and body can co-exist and work together. This idea of the soul makes any thought of personal survival after death impossible. Plato had said that souls pre-existed birth and continued after the death of those bodies which they inhabited. Aristotle disagreed with this. Just as skills cannot exist apart from skilled people, so a soul is not the kind of thing that can survive the person. How could my skills, my character or my temper survive me? A popular view at the time of Plato was that life begins when the soul enters the body. Aristotle argued that soul and body are inseparable: the soul cannot exist without a body any more than walking can happen without any legs. His works take the biological attitude towards life. The powers and principles of the soul are 'corporeal': to be alive ('animated') is to be a body with certain capacities. Aristotle takes the idea of the soul out of the eternal and places it in the here and now. He reduces soul to the essence or form of body. He is seen as having a 'materialist' view of humankind because he rejects the Platonic idea of a spiritual soul. Soul does not somehow come in from the outside. The only thing that comes in from the outside according to Aristotle is 'thought' and 'intellect'. For Aristotle, the soul and the mind are not the same thing.

Edition details

• Publisher: Lion Publishing
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0745939090
• ISBN 13: 9780745939094
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 394