Perry’s criticism of this Immaterial Soul View in his essay, expressed through his character Weirob, is based on the fact that souls cannot be and never have been perceived. According to the Immaterial Soul View, any judgments about personal identity must be judgments about souls, since the Immaterial Soul View states that a person’s identity is defined by their soul. However, since immaterial souls cannot be perceived, these judgments we make would be groundless. This means it would not be reasonable to believe people we know are who we think they are because we cannot sense and never have sensed their souls. Intuitively, this concept of judgments we make about people’s identities seems irrational and absurd.
Critically assess the claim that the soul is distinct from the body The claim that the soul is distinct from the body is a dualist belief supported by Descartes and Plato, but is refuted by monists like Aristotle and materialists such as Richard Dawkins. I believe that the soul is distinct from the body because the soul is eternal and continues in the after life, whereas the body is temporary and decays. Descartes supports his belief as he argues that the body is spatial meaning that is exists in space, whereas the mind or soul is conscious meaning we have knowledge of it. This is a dualist view as he argues that although the body and the mind/soul are separate, they interact with the brain. A strength of his argument is that it allows for mental continuity between life and the afterlife because the soul as well as the body interacts with the brain.
The saying ‘the more things change, the more they remain the same’ is related to each of these theories in different ways. When tackling the issue of change, Parmenides takes his theory of reality into account. Parmenides states that there is no such thing as change and that our senses are deceiving, and therefore, our perception of the world does not reflect reality. Parmenides believes in the ‘one’ being, which is unchangeable, immobile and eternal. Parmenides also says that everything is, has been and always shall be due to the importance he gives to thought and language.
On the other hand, anti-realists consider reality fundamentally separate from language, and insist that meaning is a matter of coherence, not correspondence: a statement achieves meaning and truth through its relationship to other ideas or activities. This is called the coherence theory. Attempts to understand or analyse religious language usually depend upon one or other of these theories. Verification and Falsification One way of establishing whether or not a statement is meaningful was proposed by A J Ayer. This criterion for meaning was called the Verification Principle and insisted that for a statement to be meaningful, it must be verifiable by sense experiences – or, in the weaker form of the principle, it should be possible to know what sense experience could make the statement probable.
One of the most intensely contemplated questions that philosophy has asked is what defines person’s identity. Identity is the fundamental quality of a human being, but what does “personal identity” refer to? What exactly makes us who we are? It’s easy to find identity in our physical bodies, but it is difficult to find “how ‘you’ or ‘I’ can be found in the mind, spirit or soul, since these, not having spatial reference points, are not places where anything can be located, in the normal sense of the word” (Fox). John Locke, one of the most notable philosophers of the 17th century, believed that all true knowledge came solely from human experience.
This happens because new philosophers focus more on the concept of memories and not those of consciousness. This causes their views to be distorted and not capture Locke’s original ideas. Schechtman an alternative method to analyzes Locke’s view that focuses on the importance of self-understanding. This new insight on his views focuses more why the consciousness is so essential to personal identity without basing it purely off the
Explain, with examples, Plato’s theory of the Forms Plato’s theory of the form is based on the idea that there is another world that contains universals such as ‘Good’. He believed our innate knowledge of forms such as ‘Justice’ comes from within our souls and show themselves in our physical world as particulars. We can also identify Forms in everyday objects such as similarity and equality. In this essay I will explain his ideas in more detail: When Plato refers to a Form, he doesn’t mean the word ‘Form’ in the sense of an outline e.g. a mannequin.
Having argued that there are universals, Russell attempts to justify the existence of ‘Properties’, a type of universal. Resemblance Nominalism rejects the existence of Properties on the grounds that there are no universals. But since it considers resemblances between Particulars to exist, it
The Maxim of Freedom of Expression in Light of Kant Concept The issue of autonomy has for long been viewed as self centered. The critics of autonomy claim that it gives an individual the moral justification to have less use of other individuals. The independent individual is believed to be his own ethical judge and has little or no need of the outside world or the people around him. This paper defends the right of expression of individuals against this critique. The analysis of this critique is based on Kantian concepts.
Soft materialists agree to a point but their key belief is that everything emerges from the physical, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that everything can be reduced to the physical. They would argue that material is the base of everything and the mind emerges from the material - this is backed up by the example that while there would be no thoughts without brains, thoughts can’t be simply reduced to the brain as a material object. Gilbert Ryle is an advocate of Materialism and argues that talking of the soul is a ‘category mistake’. He argues that the soul is not a quantifiable phenomena that can be