The soul or atman, credited with the ability to enliven the body, was located by ancient anatomists and philosophers in the lungs or heart, in the pineal gland (Descartes), and generally in the brain.

It is possible one’s mind might exist without one’s body. One’s mind is a different entity from one’s body.

Descartes considered the body and the soul to be ontologically separate but interacting entities, each with its own particular attributes. He then sought to specify both their mode and site of interaction; the latter he deduced to be the pineal gland.

The soul is the first actuality of a natural body that has life potentially. Remember that first actuality is a kind of potentiality—a capacity to engage in the activity which is the corresponding second actuality.

The five components are: Ren, Ka, Ib, Ba and Sheut.

Animals have souls, but most Hindu scholars say that animal souls evolve into the human plane during the reincarnation process. So, yes, animals are a part of the same life-death-rebirth cycle that humans are in, but at some point they cease to be animals and their souls enter human bodies so they can be closer to God.

in the tripartite psychology of the Republic, Plato characterizes the “spirited” part of the soul as the “ally of reason”: like the auxiliaries of the just city, whose distinctive job is to support the policies and judgments passed down by the rulers, spirit’s distinctive “job” in the soul is to support and defend the …

In some ethnic groups, there can also be more than two souls. Like among the Tagbanwa people, where a person is said to have six souls – the “free soul” (which is regarded as the “true” soul) and five secondary souls with various functions.

Plato concludes that there are three separate parts of the soul: appetite, spirit, and reason. In what way are these three distinct parts, and in what way do they make up a unified whole?

According to Plato, the appetitive part of the soul is the one that is accountable for the desires in people. Finally, the spirited soul produces the desires that love victory and honor. In the just soul, the spirit acts as an implementer of the rational soul, making sure that the rules of reason are adhered to.

A soul, Aristotle says, is “the actuality of a body that has life,” where life means the capacity for self-sustenance, growth, and reproduction. If one regards a living substance as a composite of matter and form, then the soul is the form of a natural—or, as Aristotle sometimes says, organic—body.

The World of Forms Since the body is like one world and the soul like the other, it would be strange to think that even though the body lasts for some time after a person’s death, the soul immediately dissolves and exists no further.

A soul theory that individuates souls psychologically makes the same predictions as a psychological-continuity-based view and so encounters the same difficulties.

The soul acts as a link between the material body and the spiritual self, and therefore shares some characteristics of both. The soul can be attracted either towards the spiritual or towards the material realm, being thus the “battlefield” of good and evil.

For, if the soul exists, it is an immaterial substance. And, in as much as it is an immaterial substance, it is not subject to the decomposition of material things; hence, it is immortal. Most dualists agree that the soul is identical to the mind, yet different from the brain or its functions.

Souls are thinking substances for Locke, and if persons are substances, they would count as such. Thus, persons cannot be substances, for otherwise wherever there is a person and her soul there are two thinking substances in the same place at the same time.

He postulated that, at birth, the mind was a blank slate, or tabula rasa. Contrary to Cartesian philosophy based on pre-existing concepts, he maintained that we are born without innate ideas, and that knowledge is instead determined only by experience derived from sense perception, a concept now known as empiricism.

John Locke was an English philosopher and political theorist who was born in 1632 in Wrington, Somerset, England, and died in 1704 in High Laver, Essex. He is recognized as the founder of British empiricism and the author of the first systematic exposition and defense of political liberalism.

According to Locke, personal identity (the self) “depends on consciousness, not on substance” nor on the soul. We are the same person to the extent that we are conscious of the past and future thoughts and actions in the same way as we are conscious of present thoughts and actions.

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Locke famously wrote that man has three natural rights: life, liberty and property. In his “Thoughts Concerning Education” (1693), Locke argued for a broadened syllabus and better treatment of students—ideas that were an enormous influence on Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s novel “Emile” (1762).

Among these fundamental natural rights, Locke said, are “life, liberty, and property.” Locke believed that the most basic human law of nature is the preservation of mankind. To serve that purpose, he reasoned, individuals have both a right and a duty to preserve their own lives.

In simple terms, Locke’s social contract theory says: government was created through the consent of the people to be ruled by the majority, “(unless they explicitly agree on some number greater than the majority),” and that every man once they are of age has the right to either continue under the government they were …

Locke favored a representative government such as the English Parliament, which had a hereditary House of Lords and an elected House of Commons. But he wanted representatives to be only men of property and business. Consequently, only adult male property owners should have the right to vote.

Locke argued in support of individual property rights as natural rights. Following the argument the fruits of one’s labor are one’s own because one worked for it. Furthermore, the laborer must also hold a natural property right in the resource itself because exclusive ownership was immediately necessary for production.