The Concept of the Soul and Self

2593 Words11 Pages
In this essay I shall discuss the problem of personal identity, addressing in particular the personal problem of identifying oneself, instead of the more social problem of identifying others. I will also be discussing whether or not an afterlife is possible with the various criteria that I evaluate. So therefore, this essay will deal more with the ideas on problems of self and consciousness such as “Do you really know that you are the same person you were 10 years ago?”, rather than social dilemmas such as “how would you put blame on somebody who committed a crime 60 years ago, but has changed a lot since?”In the first section, I will introduce three possible criteria that attempt to solve the problem of personal identity; the memory, body and the soul criteria. I will look at these in terms of the problem of personal identity of the self, while ignoring the implications it might have for identifying others in difficult social situations. I will also conclude that the first two criteria do not offer the possibility of life after death. In the second section, I will propose a possible definition for the soul, one that resembles Cartesian Dualism, and show how it avoids the problems of the other two criteria, while also being concordant with traditional theological concepts of the soul.In the third section, I will discuss some of the implications for accepting this definition of the soul, and the other possibilities that this definition produces.Finally, I will conclude that this proposal is an inadequate one, and doesn’t satisfactorily solve the problem of personal identity; nor does it offer a substantial hope for the notion of afterlife. I will also conclude that there is some hope of a desirable afterlife, however insubstantial this hope may be.The body criterion is perhaps the most commonly used criterion for assessing whether a particular person is the same
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