Soul
Earlier this week, the Washington Post published a new year’s piece entitled How I learned to heal my soul, with help from love and Socrates by Paul Woodruff, former professor of philosophy and classics for 49 years at the University of Texas. The piece may be behind a paywall, but the gist of it is that the author feels his soul was broken as a soldier in Vietnam but he found a guide to reharmonize it in Socrates. Socrates instructed that “it is worse to do wrong than to have wrong done to you,” that “to nurture the soul…must take precedence over seeking wealth or fame,” that “the most important thing about us is our soul,” and to “nurture your soul and help others nurture theirs.” Woodruff concludes, “In this season of love and friendship and caring, pay attention to beauty of soul, and help it flourish. It is what matters most.”
I thought it was a nice piece. It was interesting though, that the author mentioned soul 22 times without ever defining it or describing it. I assume this was on purpose as any reader could then use their own personal interpretation of soul. This sent me googling around to find other philosophical descriptions of soul, and I came across a 2013 online essay Do We Have Souls? by Tim O'Connor, professor of philosophy at Indiana University. Rather than following Socrates, O’Connor looks toward Aristotle, whose “broader nonreductionist, nondualistic vision is very much worth developing in contemporary terms,” thus finding an alternative beyond Descartes’ dualism and de la Mettrie’s reductionism by considering soul as an emergent property of embodied persons. O’Connor has elaborated much further on the philosophy of emergence in writing the Emergent Properties chapter in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy in 2020. That encyclopedia chapter would take some time to work through, so I’ll end this post here to see if others have a viewpoint on soul.
Mark I
(as an experiment, I am posting this on both the RNA newsgroup and the RNA forum)
Soul
Re: Soul
I find words like "soul", "mind", and "self" frustrating because they can mean so many different things to different people. In the case of soul many people agree that it can refer to the essence of a person. But is that essence something separate from the material individual or is it an individuals unique qualities?