Ethics Finder

Body / Soul

There are broadly two ways of thinking about the soul and its relation to the body. According to the first which is associated with Plato, Augustine, and Descartes, and defended in recent times by the English philosopher Richard Swinburne, the soul is an immaterial spiritual entity that inhabits and governs the body, animating and directing it. The soul is the mental and moral subject which we self-identify through a special psychological use of the term ‘I’. It is that which perceives through the organs of the body, thinks within itself, then acts in the world by using the body as an instrument. According to the second view associated with Aristotle, Aquinas and contemporary Thomists, the soul is the form of the body, that is to say it is its principle of life, organisation and operation including mental functions. Just as a spherical form is what makes a physical object to be a sphere, and an equine form makes a horse to be the kind of animal it is with its specific anatomy and activities, so the human soul is what causes the body to be alive and act in its characteristic ways. According to Aristotle and Aquinas not all of these activities have bodily organs which shows that the human soul need not depend entirely on the body opening the prospect that it may survive its dissolution.

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