Tags / 36 quotes from 9 sources
#soul
Adesso basta (Simone Perotti)
Abbiamo venduto l'anima al sistema
E tuttavia, per avere queste cose, per viverle e aderirvi pienamente, come dei moderni Faust, abbiamo dovuto vendere l’anima al diavolo, cioè abbiamo dovuto aderire a un sistema che se da un lato ci dà questo ben di Dio, dall’altro ci ha chiesto in consegna il passaporto…
Human, All Too Human: A Book For Free Spirits
Astrology and morality
Astrology and the Like.—It is presumable that the objects of the religious, moral, aesthetic and logical notions pertain simply to the superficialities of things, although man flatters himself with the thought that here at least he is getting to the heart of the cosmos. [...]…
Free spirits have contempt for that which is called their "duty"
It may be conjectured that a soul in which the type of "free spirit" can attain maturity and completeness had its decisive and deciding event in the form of a great emancipation or unbinding, and that prior to that event it seemed only the more firmly and forever chained to its…
La Formica Zen (italian Edition) ( )
Ascoltare il bambino che abbiamo nell'anima
Se ascolteremo il bambino che abbiamo nell'anima, i nostri occhi torneranno a brillare. Se non perderemo il contatto con questo bimbo, non smarriremo il rapporto con la vita."
Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle)
Experts and the public disagree about dualism
The philosophy of mind has a special feature that distinguishes it from other branches of philosophy. In most philosophical subjects there is no sharp division between what the professionals believe and the opinions of the educated general public. But on the issues discussed in…
Descartes divides the territory between science and religion
Cartesian dualism was important in the seventeenth century for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that it seemed to divide up the territory between science and religion. In the seventeenth century the new scientific discoveries seemed to pose a threat to…
The ghost in the machine
Each mind is an immortal soul. Bodies, as physical entities, are determined by the laws of physics; but minds have free will. Each of us as a self is identical with his or her mind. As living human beings we are composite entities, comprising both a mind and a body, but for…
Is my body essential to my identity
But is this body really essential to my identity? It seems at least possible to imagine that I might, like Gregor Samsa in the story by Kafka, wake up in a completely different body. But if the same body is not what makes me me, then what does make me me? What is the relation…
Descartes denies that animals have minds
If every mind is a spiritual or mental substance, and if minds are indestructible, then it seems that if animals have minds, every animal has an immortal soul. But if it turns out that every dog, cat, mouse, flea, and grasshopper has an immortal soul, then, to put it mildly…
Not like a pilot in a ship
In a famous passage Descartes said we should not think of the mind as lodged in the body like a pilot in a ship, but we should really think that it is somehow suffused throughout the body. If I bump into something I do not observe my body banging into another object in a way…
Substance dualism and religious faith
Because of the failures of Cartesian-style dualism, especially the failure to get an adequate or even coherent account of the relationship between the mind and the body, it is widely assumed that substance dualism in any form is out of the question. This is not to say that no…
Three arguments against dualism
The refutation of dualism is harder. Let us define dualism as the view that there are two distinct metaphysical ontological realms in the universe, one mental the other physical. This is harder to refute, because whereas materialism postulated the nonexistence of something we…
Shantaram (gregory David Roberts)
The sin in the crime
For me, the most important thing is the amount of sin that is in the crime. You asked me, just now, why we do not make money from prostitution and drugs, as the other councils do, and I tell you it is because of the sin that is in those crimes. It is for this reason that I will…
A small religious fanatic
‘So go on, tell me. What’s he like, that little kid?’ ‘Well, I think he’s some kind of religious fanatic,’ I confided, smiling, as I looked over my shoulder at the sleeping boy. ‘He made me stop three times today, and this evening, so he could say his prayers. I don’t know if…
The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray)
Shamanic flight between three worlds
Only after this experience of death and resurrection were they apprenticed to an established shaman. The teaching they received was substantially the same over a vast geographical area—that they were not their physical body, but were capable of sidestepping time and space. For…
I am everything I behold
“People may sense internal organs and physiological processes usually kept out of consciousness.” That was exactly what had just happened to me when I felt I was seeing the internal structure of the eye. Then I began to wonder whether the same mechanism couldn’t have been…
The Book Of Dead Philosophers (critchley, Simon)
Pythagorean numbers and the music of the spheres
Pythagorean doctrines were bound by an oath of secrecy, so we know very little prior to the version of them that appears in Plato. These include a belief in the immortality and transmigration of the soul and the view that the ultimate reality of the universe consists in number…
The Book: On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
The body is in the soul
It is not enough, therefore, to describe, define, and try to understand things or events by analysis alone, by taking them to pieces to find out “how they are made.” This tells us much, but probably rather less than half the story. Today, scientists are more and more aware that…
The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian)
Dementia as peeling the onion to its core
This is closer to the view taken by Janet and her daughter Jackie, who run the care home where Linda is now a resident. Janet utterly rejects the common view that dementia is the slow death of the self. ‘I have a belief that dementia actually makes you more like yourself, so…
The soul as the pearl of self
However, there is one possible candidate for the pearl of self that we have so far ignored: the soul. Many people believe that a human being, in addition to having a physical body, also has a non-physical part which does not depend on oxygen and food and which can persist long…
The computer that thought it was res cogitans
There was a wonderful cartoon that circulated around university departments when I was an undergraduate that dramatised this fallacy beautifully. A thought bubble emerges from a computer. ‘I think,’ it says. In the next frame, ‘I think, therefore I am.’ Cogito ergo sum, in…
Team spirit and the ghost in the machine
My favourite of Ryle’s many examples is the person who understands that playing cricket requires team-spirit, but thinks that contributing team-spirit is an activity additional to batting, bowling and fielding, rather than being tied up with the manner of doing all of them.3…
No further facts about persons
in the split-brain case, there is a truth about what has happened to the person which we cannot know on the basis of the physical facts, namely, which of them is me. This is an example of what Derek Parfit calls a ‘further fact’ view of the self.8 According to such theories…
Soul as light bulb, brain as socket
‘What I have argued,’ he writes, ‘… is that without a functioning brain, the soul will not function (i.e. have conscious episodes) – not that it will not exist.’9 Swinburne uses the analogy of a light bulb to explain this. ‘The soul is like a light bulb and the brain is like an…
Swinburne's dualism laid bare
Swinburne is not the only serious thinker to advocate the existence of non-material souls, of course. But he is one of the most eminent, and his account is one of the most systematic and thorough. His writings lay bare the logic of dualistic souls, and once exposed, its…
Time to bury the immaterial soul
To switch metaphors, if the soil is not proving to be fertile, it is better to plant elsewhere than to continue in the hope that persistence will bear fruit. In all my years of reading and thinking about soul and self, I’ve yet to come across a single argument that is left…
Four claims about the self
My argument so far supports four main claims: First, there is no thing or part of you which contains your essence. Your body, your brain and your memories are all very important for who you are, but none of these is the pearl of self in which your identity resides. Second, you…
Souls preserve identity only with consciousness
Locke continues, ‘He is no more one self with either of them than if the soul or immaterial spirit that now informs him had been created, and began to exist, when it began to inform his present body.’ In itself, having the soul of someone now dead no more makes you that person…
The physical is what fits physicists' equations
the only way physicists can really understand the universe is in the language of mathematics. The fundamental basis of physics is not atoms, or even subatomic particles, but equations. That is why, for all its mysteriousness, dark matter does have all the reality that is needed…
Remaining mysteries don't justify souls
Those who hold on to the idea that something other than a functioning brain is required to create persons with a sense of self are simply not looking the evidence in the face. Just because some mysteries remain, that does not mean that everything is a mystery, and it certainly…
Christians without dualist souls
Having dismissed the idea that we have immaterial souls, you might assume that there is nothing left to be said for the Christian idea of a life to come. However, I was surprised to discover that many Christians, including Pope Benedict XVI, do not believe in the dualist soul…
My soul is not me
Aquinas, for instance, believed in the existence of immaterial souls but wrote, ‘Soul is not the whole human being, only part of one: my Soul is not me.’2 Little wonder that the future Pope Benedict, then Cardinal Ratzinger, could write nearly 800 years later: ‘We have…
Psuchê as the organisation of living matter
the word ‘soul’ in the New Testament is usually a translation of the Greek word psuchê, which it is generally agreed does not necessarily apply to what Thacker describes as ‘a kind of detachable non-material part of me’. Aristotle, for instance, talks about psuchê and many…
Soul means the whole embodied man
‘Scripture contains no word denoting only the body (separated and distinguished from the soul),’ wrote Ratzinger, ‘while conversely in the vast majority of cases the word soul, too, means the whole corporeally existing man.’4
Immortality as a gift of God
One corollary of this view is that, as Thacker puts it, ‘it is not remotely the case that the soul has its own inherent immortality. Basically God makes the call after death whether we survive or not. Immortality is a gift of God, and it’s a gift of God after death, it’s not a…
No sermons on the soul
‘In my forty years of being an evangelical, probably thirty years of remembering sermons, I don’t think I’ve heard a single sermon on the soul.’ Preachers tend to steer clear because it is all rather murky and complicated. This may seem reasonable, but in some ways I think it’s…