The Soul

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Two conceptions of soul pervade the Western philosophical tradition, one manifestly theistic and one decidedly not. In the Christian philosophical tradition, for instance, the soul plays a central role in understandings of post mortem existence and personal identity, as well as in conceptions of the dignity of the human person. This approach to the soul we find explored and exalted in glorious detail in Augustine's Confessions. Still, the soul existed in the Western philosophical tradition before there was Christianity, however, most prominently in the systems of Plato and Aristotle. Aristotle devoted an entire treatise to its consideration, De Anima, which depicts the soul not as a locus of personal identity or as an immaterial being capable of existing in its own right without the body, but as a principle of life, as that which differentiates the living from the non-living and which grounds the unity of the living system. These two conceptions of soul—as an (1) immaterial entity capable of surviving the death of the body and as a (2) principle of life for all living things—seem on the surface, and even a good deal below the surface—to be talking about two different sorts of things, accidentally (if understandably) given the same name, the soul. One bold hypothesis, owing above all else to the seminal synthesis of Aristotelianism within theistic philosophy, both Christian and Islamic, takes a different view: the soul understood as a repository of value and the soul understood as a principle of life are, on the contrary, one and the same. A crucial question about this proposed synthesis arises unavoidably: can one and the same soul hold both offices? Or is this synthesis really rather a mixture of inconsistent views, serving only to water down each while preserving nothing of value in either?