Do we have souls?
This was the question posed by Dr Hugh Burling, Head of Philosophy and Theology, to the recent meeting of the Year 9 Athenaeum.
This debate has been dominated in recent times by a “materialist” or “physicalist” stance, which rejects the “dualist” view that humans have a material body and an immaterial soul. In the last fifty years, however, developments in how we think about language and logic have reinvigorated traditional arguments for dualism in academic philosophy of mind.
Dr Burling began by offering two alternative things we might mean by a soul, using Descartes as an initial reference point. Descartes believed in a non-physical part of each human which thinks thoughts, feels feelings, desires outcomes, admires goods, etc.: our res cogitans or “thinking thing”, aka the mind. He then presented a common-sense argument for dualism in that as humans we tend to assume that our thoughts and feelings are real and discussed a range of scenarios when that seems to be the case.
He ended by pointing out that although a lot of our common-sense beliefs seem to support the idea of dualism, this may well change as language and culture develop.
