Soul, mind and body

Overview

Recall questions on Plato's divided and immortal soul, Aristotle's soul as the form of the body, substance dualism and Descartes' arguments from doubt and divisibility, the interaction problem, identity theory and eliminative materialism, the hard problem of consciousness, the category-mistake objection, and whether the soul is a metaphor.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   What does Plato take the soul to be?

   Model answer

   For Plato the soul is the immaterial and genuinely essential part of a person, temporarily housed in a body which it survives. The body belongs to the changing world of the senses and is often a hindrance; the soul belongs with the Forms and is what does the knowing. Personal identity therefore rests wholly in the soul, and death is a release rather than an ending.

2. 2

   How does Plato divide the soul, and what image does he use?

   Model answer

   He divides it into reason, spirit and appetite. Reason seeks truth and should rule; spirit supplies courage, honour and indignation; appetite drives hunger, thirst and desire. He pictures the soul as a charioteer driving two horses, one noble and obedient and one unruly. Justice within a person is each part doing its own work under the direction of reason.

3. 3

   What reasons does Plato give for thinking the soul immortal?

   Model answer

   He argues that the soul is simple and has no parts, so it cannot fall apart as composite things do. He argues from recollection: we recognise perfect equality and perfect justice although we have never met them, which suggests the soul knew the Forms before birth. And he argues from affinity, since the soul resembles the eternal unchanging Forms it contemplates more than it resembles the perishable body.

4. 4

   What does Aristotle mean by calling the soul the form of the body?

   Model answer

   He means that a living thing is matter organised in a particular way, and the soul is that organisation: the set of capacities that make this collection of tissue a living, functioning creature. To have a soul is simply to be alive and to do what living things of that kind do. So the soul is not an occupant of the body but the way the body is arranged and behaves.

5. 5

   What analogies does Aristotle use for the relation of soul and body?

   Model answer

   He compares the soul to sight: if the eye were an animal, sight would be its soul, since sight is what the eye is for and what it does. He also compares it to the shape impressed in wax, where it makes no sense to ask whether the shape and the wax are two separate things. In both cases you cannot peel the one off the other and have it survive.

6. 6

   On Aristotle's account, can the soul survive the death of the body?

   Model answer

   In general it cannot. If the soul is the functioning of a particular living body, then when that body ceases to function the soul ceases too, just as sight ceases when an eye is destroyed. Aristotle does make some puzzling remarks about intellect being separable, which later thinkers seized on, but his main position leaves no room for a person surviving death as Plato imagined.

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