Following Aristotle, the Muslim philosophers Avicenna (Ibn Sina) and Ibn al-Nafis, further elaborated on the Aristotelian understanding of the soul and developed their own theories on the soul. They both made a distinction between the soul and the spirit, and in particular, the Avicennian doctrine on the nature of the soul was influential among the Scholastics. Some of Avicennas views on the soul included the idea that the immortality of the soul is a consequence of its nature, and not a purpose for it to fulfill. In his theory of The Ten Intellects, he viewed the human soul as the tenth and final intellect. While he was imprisoned, Avicenna wrote his famous Floating Man thought experiment to demonstrate human self-awareness and the substantiality of the soul. He told his readers to imagine themselves suspended in the air, isolated from all sensations, which includes no sensory contact with even their own bodies. He argues that in this scenario one would still have self-consciousness. He thus concludes that the idea of the self is not logically dependent on any physical thing, and that the soul should not be seen in relative terms, but as a primary given, a substance. This argument was later refined and simplified by René Descartes in epistemic terms when he stated: I can abstract from the supposition of all external things, but not from the supposition of my own consciousness.[15] Avicenna generally supported Aristotles idea of the soul originating from the heart, whereas Ibn al-Nafis rejected this idea and instead argued that the soul is related to the entirety and not to one or a few organs. He further criticized Aristotles idea that every unique soul requires the existence of a unique source, in this case the heart. Ibn al-Nafis concluded that the soul is related primarily neither to the spirit nor to any organ, but rather to the entire matter whose temperament is prepared to receive that soul, and he defined the soul as nothing other than what a human indicates by saying I.[16] Thomas Aquinas Following Aristotle and Avicenna, St. Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 1274) understood the soul to be the first actuality of the living body. Consequent to this, he distinguished three orders of life: plants, which feed and grow; animals, which add sensation to the operations of plants; and humans, which add intellect to the operations of animals. Concerning the human soul, his epistemological theory required that, since the knower becomes what he knows[17] the soul was definitely not corporeal: for, if it were corporeal when it knew what some corporeal thing was, that thing would come to be within it. Therefore, the soul had an operation which did not rely on a bodily organ and therefore the soul could subsist without the body. Furthermore, since the rational soul of human beings was a subsistent form and not something made up of matter and form, it could not be destroyed in any natural process.[18] The full argument for the immortality of the soul and Thomass elaboration of Aristotelian theory is found in Question 75 of the Summa Theologica.
Posted on: Thu, 16 Jan 2014 03:10:02 +0000
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