Soul
The soul is traditionally understood as the immaterial part of a person: the source of intellect and will, the part that survives death, and sometimes the same thing as the self. In Christianity it is the part of a person that can be saved.[1]
Greek philosophy
Much later thinking about the soul goes back to the ancient Greeks.[1]
- Plato wrote of the psyche, the soul, and also of a World Soul.
- Plotinus placed Soul within a hierarchy of reality running from the One, or the Good, through Intelligence to Soul.
- Aristotle treated the soul as the principle of life, with the human soul being distinctively rational.
Medieval Islamic and Jewish thinkers developed these ideas further.[1] Plato's Phaedo links the soul's immortality to its intelligibility, and the Islamic philosopher Ibn Sina also wrote on the soul.[2]
Soul and spirit
Soul is often paired with spirit. Spirit has been understood as breath or the principle of life, mediating between body and soul. Aquinas wrote of a "spiritualised" body.[3]
Survival of death
The soul matters to religion largely because of the question of an afterlife. Many religions teach that the immortal soul is judged after death and lives on with God.[4]
Modern philosophers debate whether survival requires a soul at all. Dean Zimmerman argues that survival is conceivable whether materialism or dualism is true: God could preserve souls, or could gather and reassemble matter. But, he cautions, being able to imagine yourself as an immaterial soul does not show that this is really possible.[5] Zimmerman discusses Mark Johnston's account of persons and criticises van Inwagen's "animalism".[5]
Johnston himself argues that we are not mere sums of temporal parts, which he calls "ontological trash", but enduring substances: embodied rational wills.[6]
Continuity without a soul
Not all traditions teach a soul. A Buddhist catechism by Olcott, discussed by Eckel,, Buddhism is presented as having continuity from life to life without an "eternal, metaphysical soul-substance".[7] See Reincarnation.
In Zoroastrianism
In Zoroastrianism, the soul faces a reckoning after death at the Chinvat crossing, where thoughts, words and deeds are weighed. In later texts the righteous soul is met there by a beautiful woman who is its own daena, the sum of its deeds.[8]
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 "Soul". Philosophy of Religion A-Z. Palgrave Macmillan. 2016. p. 202.
- ↑ "Immortality". Philosophy of Religion A-Z. Palgrave Macmillan. 2016. pp. 101–103.
- ↑ "Spirit". Philosophy of Religion A-Z. Palgrave Macmillan. 2016. p. 206.
- ↑ "Death". Philosophy of Religion A-Z. Palgrave Macmillan. 2016. pp. 60–61.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 Draper, Paul, ed. (2019). "Chapter 5 (Dean Zimmerman)". Current Controversies in Philosophy of Religion. Routledge.
- ↑ Draper, Paul, ed. (2019). "Chapter 4 (Mark Johnston)". Current Controversies in Philosophy of Religion. Routledge.
- ↑ Patton, Kimberley C.; Ray, Benjamin C., eds. (2000). "Contested Identities". A Magic Still Dwells: Comparative Religion in the Postmodern Age. University of California Press. p. 59.
- ↑ Rose, Jenny (2014). "Zoroastrians Present and Past". Zoroastrianism: An Introduction. I.B. Tauris.