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Making the Case for the Soul in an Age of Neuroscience
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 November 2014
Extract
Modern philosophy has been inhospitable to the soul. In the English-speaking world, the dominant tendency, since Hobbes and Locke, has been to subordinate the mental to the physical. Even where mental phenomena are granted real existence, they are construed as effects of underlying physical processes. To explain them is to identify their physical causes. Physicalist approaches to the mind cannot but see the soul as, in Gilbert Ryle's derisive phrase, a “ghost in the machine.” It is an unwanted leftover from a religious age with a bygone philosophical psychology. To the extent that mental entities do any explanatory work, modern philosophy favors “mind” over “soul.”
- Type
- Review Essay*
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- Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 2014
Footnotes
*
Lenn E. Goodman and D. Gregory Caramenico, Coming to Mind: The Soul and Its Body. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).
References
1 Aristotle conceptually distinguishes soul (psuchē) from mind (nous). Mind may survive bodily demise. The active capacity of mind, its ability to achieve a knowledge identical with that which knows, is “separable, impassible, unmixed” (De an. 430a). This becomes the Active Intellect of medieval philosophy. How precisely it relates to the soul cannot be taken up here.
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4 Angela Matthies, Andrew Stephenson, and Nick Tasker, The Concept of Emergence in Systems Biology: A Project Report, accessed October 21, 2014, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0018/3906/Concept_of_Emergence.pdf [emphasis added].
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