Plato was a great defender of immortality, he believed, “there is a realm of perfect knowledge. In several of his dialogue he suggested various ingenious arguments in favour on the immortality of the soul. Plato was greatly influenced by Socrates. Socrates expressed the traditional Greek view, which is that of the disembodied spirits or soul. He maintained that the death of the body can have no real and lasting effect on the soul, which will survive after the demise of the physical body. Plato suggested that the body belongs to the physical world and, like all physical things, it will one day turn to dust. Plato believed, the soul belongs to a higher realm where eternal truths, such as justice, love goodness, are imperishable and endure forever. For Plato, the aim of the soul is to break free from the chains of physical matter and fly to the realm of ideas, “this is the spiritual realm of true reality”. This is where it will be able to spend eternity in contemplation of the true, beautiful and the good. Plato said the soul spends its earthly existence contemplating and pursuing these ideals forms therefore it will be ready to enter without any regret, “ordinary people seem not to realise that those who really apply themselves in proper way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for death and dying”.
The disembodied soul is the view that the soul survives death without ether the earthly body or a new body. Muslims believe in a disembodied survival of death during which the soul is questioned and sentenced to either torment or ease until the day comes when the soul and earthly body are reunited. Similarity, many Buddhist believe in a transitional period between death and reincarnation when the soul exits unembodied, and some Christians believe that the afterlife at least partly consist in disembodied survival.
Reincarnation is another doctrine of dualism. It is believed through out the world by mainly Hindus and Buddhists. Reincarnation can be defined as a theory that one and the same human mind successively animates two or more different bodies. It is believed that after ones death the body disintegrates, but the immaterial essence will be reborn in another body. And after that incarnation it will be reborn again many times or perhaps even an infinite number of times.
The theory of Karma and rebirth is concerned with the soul’s journey from illusion to reality (Nirvana). The soul continues from life to life, being reincarnated until it finds the eternal truth. After this the soul is not reborn any more and is united with Brahman. Thus, when an individual dies, they’re mental or non-bodily, aspects live on and the next birth is determined by how good or bad their Karma was in the last life. “Just as a person casts off worn-out garments and puts on others that are new. Even so does the disembodied soul casts off worn-out bodies and take on others that are new”,(Bhagavad-Gita). Karma is an impersonal law, like gravity, which ensures that what ever occurs in a person, whether it to be good or bad, is a just consequence of past actions. Reincarnation is the process used by Spirit to progress the soul through evolutionary cycles. With each lifetime, the soul repays karmic debt, receives rewards for karmic credit and sets-up situations that cause the soul to face spiritual lessons and make choices to progress the enlightenment of the soul. If we learn our lessons, we move forward, if we repeat old patterns and chose not to learn, we can remain stagnant and will have to repeat the lesson again. In reincarnation before the sprit is born or attach to the physical body it’s going to inhabit in this incarnation, the spirit makes a few decisions. It decide which past lives to pull into this one, it decides the lessons and karmic events it will work on, it can make an agreement with another soul(s) to join together in this coming life to resolve personal karma. All these issues are defined in a Master Plan (like a blue print) for this coming life.
In the Hindu and Buddhist tradition the view is held that we have lived many lives before and that, on death, we will be reborn again. The conditions of our present lives are believed to be a direct consequence of our previous lives.
Arguments for dualism
Dualism has received a lot of attention in the past and Descartes has not been the only philosopher who has written on dualism. Great names such as Plato, Aristotle and Aquinas have all put forward their ideas on the subject each one differing slightly.
Plato believed that the soul belonged to a level of reality that was higher of that of the body. He stated that the soul was immortal and this derived from his theory of ideas, which he called forms. For every existence there is a perfect idea/form: For every man there is an ideal man for every dog there is an ideal dog.
A major argument in support for Dualism is the Argument from Religion. This argument comes from the ideas of ones religious belifs, which usually have a strong emphasis on the immortality of the soul.
Another popular argument in support of Dualism is known as the, “arguments from Irreducibility”, this argument simply supports the idea that thee is no physical explanation for things. When considering this argument a huge emphasis is placed on mathematics and the idea that it relies on assumption that are false.
Another argument for dualism comes from parapsychology this states that telepathy and etc are difficult to explain within the confines of physics.
Arguments against dualism
One popular argument against dualism appeals to simplicity or to the principle of, Ockham’s razor. This supports the idea that one kind of substance, to not concern ourselves with, “entities beyond what is strictly necessary to explain the phenomena.
Another argument against dualism is supported by the idea of, “Explanatory Impotence”, as compared to neuroscience. Basically, this argument is supported by the fact that there is so much physical evidence of the brain and its microstructure that a doctor or neuroscientist could tell us about the brain, but not much factual evidence that the dualist could tell us about spiritual substance.
There many unanswered questions this is a major weakness for dualism these are, how is the mind related to the body? How can they interact if they are so different? Why does the brain injury damage mental functions?
There is a conflict with evolutionary theory. Brains have evolved but have minds always been? Why would mind evolve in parallel with brain evolution?
Gilbert Ryle criticised the dualistic view as being guilty of making a category mistake. To view the body and soul as being two separate and distinct entities is like watching a game of cricket and asking, “where is the team sprit”, or looking around all the colleges in Cambridge and asking, “where’s the University?”, such a questions fail to recognise that they are part of the whole, not separate entities. Bryan McGee wrote, “the human body is a single entity, one subject of behaviour and experience with a single history. We are not two entities mysterious laced together. We have made what Ryle calls a category mistake”.
Life after death is also categorised in monism. Monism (Greek monos,"single"), in philosophy, is a doctrine that ultimate reality is entirely of one substance.
Monism is a metaphysical theory that reality is all of one substance, rather than two or more. E.g., materialist monism, which holds that matter is the single substance making up all there, is. In philosophy of mind, monism is usually contrasted with the position that mind and matter are deeply different. Monism states that mind and matter essentially the same. Three basic types of monism are recognized: materialistic monism, idealistic monism, and the mind-stuff theory. According to the first doctrine, everything in the universe, including mental phenomena, is reduced to the one category of matter. For Spinoza, this basic substance was God. Thus the only real thing is God, who is neither physical nor mental. Spinoza's position is similar to that of Russell's , however the final is not committed to the belief that a supreme being is the more basic substance.
Philosophical materialism (physicalism), also goes against dualism is the metaphysical view that there is only in the universe and that substance is physical, empirical or material. Materialists believe that substance does not exist and that the mind and body cannot be separated and that each influences the other. , supernatural or phenomena are either delusions or reducible to physical forces.
Materialists are not necessarily atheists, nor do they deny the reality of such things as love or justice, beauty or goodness. Materialism as a whole is anti-religious, anti-theological, and is best described in the writings of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin. According to philosophers such as Marx, Lenin, and Friedrich Engels, the economic structure of a society influences the political, social, and religious spheres of that society. While Materialism may have a bone to pick with general religions, it is Christianity that opposes Materialism with full force.
Resurrection is the doctrine of monism. Resurrection suggests that resurrection and eternal life depends on an act of Gods divine love. Resurrection states that after death the body disintegrates, but some point in the future God will miraculously raise it from the ground and reconsistute it as a person. Bodily resurrection is an aspect of the traditions of Islam, Judaism and Christianity, as well as many other religions. It is the re-creation by God of human individuals, not as a physical being who has died, but as a spiritual being. There is little known what this means but, using the evidence of resurrection of Jesus, it appeared before his disciples with a body, he talked and ate with them, they touched him and they saw his scars. Yet he seemed different, he appears and disappears he was beyond death, “Look at my hands and my feet… touch me and see, a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see I have”. There is further support for the view that mind and body must be united in the resurrection.
St Paul explains that the resurrected body is spiritual and therefore can last forever, “for the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality”. Paul appears to be envisaging an entity that is identifiably bodily but, because of its spiritual nature, is crucially different from the physical body, which has died.
The philosophical problems here concern the question of whether or not the resurrected person is really us. To meet this problem one famous philosopher John Hick tried to answer the question. John Hick is one of the most widely read and discussed philosophers of religion in the contemporary world John Hick put forward a reinterpretation of the doctrine of the resurrection of the body. This is known as the, “replica theory”. It suggests that, if God were to create exact replicas of us in another space, replicas possessing complete similarity of all bodily features and full continuity of memory and mental disposition, then the basic criteria of personal identity would be met, that is such a person replicated after death could be said to have survived death. The, “replica theory”, states that if you were to die now, and were then recreated with the same memories and physical body in a different place on, Australia perhaps, rather than Britain you would not long doubt that it was the same you, even when you flew back to the UK to attend your own funeral. Similarly, if God were to re-create you in heaven after my death, as “a psycho-physical”, being, (I.e. one with both a mind and body)
This thesis has been one of the most intensely discussed theories of life after death put forward in our time.
One criticism to resurrection, which was raised in the time of the church fathers and is still raised today, is , “what if a Christian dies at sea and his body is eaten by various sea creatures, who then scatter to the seven seas? How can God possibly resurrect that Christian? What the father typically did in response to this objection was to appeal to the divine nature. No human being would be able to locate and reconstitute the relevant atoms of the Christians body, but an all knowing and all powerful God could. Gods only problem is to locate, collect, and reassemble them, the church fathers were surly right. Such a being could do that.
Arguments for monism
These arguments will centre on physcalism.
We as humans are just physical entities. We begin as a genetically programmed, monocular organisation of molecules. Development leads to behaviour controlling.
Monism is the view that there is only one kind of, “stuff”. This gives us two possibilities
- All stuff is a physical stuff a position knows as physicalism.
- All stuff is a mental stuff a position known as idealism.
