Self, death and the afterlife

Concepts of the soul (Plato, Aristotle)#

StandardAQA 7062/1 Section A: The self, death and the afterlifeDfE GCE Religious Studies subject content

Plato and Aristotle on the soul

Fig. 1Plato's soul is a separable immortal substance; Aristotle's soul is the inseparable form of the living body.

Plato is the fountainhead of soul-body dualism in Western thought. In the Phaedo and the Republic he argues that a human being is essentially a soul (psyche) temporarily imprisoned in a body: the soul is immaterial, simple and immortal, while the body is material, composite and perishable. The soul pre-exists the body and survives its death, and its true home is the intelligible realm of the Forms — the eternal, perfect archetypes (Beauty, Justice, the Good) which the soul knew before birth and dimly recollects in this life (the theory of anamnesis, learning as recollection). Because knowledge of the Forms is grasped by reason and not by the senses, Plato concludes the soul is akin to the Forms — divine, unchanging and immortal — whereas the body, tied to the deceptive senses and bodily appetites, is a hindrance to be transcended. Death, for the philosopher, is therefore a release, the soul's liberation to contemplate the Forms unimpeded.

Plato offers arguments for the soul's immortality, of which the specification-relevant ones include the argument from opposites (things come to be from their opposites, so the living come from the dead and vice versa, implying an ongoing cycle), the argument from recollection (we possess knowledge, e.g. of perfect equality, that we never learned through the senses, so the soul must have acquired it before birth), and the affinity argument (the soul resembles the invisible, unchanging, indissoluble Forms, so, unlike the composite body, it does not dissolve at death). These are a priori, rationalist arguments, and their strength depends on the contested doctrine of the Forms; if there are no Forms, the affinity and recollection arguments lose their footing.

Aristotle, Plato's pupil, rejected this dualism in favour of hylomorphism (from hyle, matter, and morphe, form). For Aristotle the soul is not a separate substance imprisoned in the body but the form of the living body — its organising principle, the set of capacities (nutrition, perception, movement, thought) in virtue of which a lump of matter is a living organism rather than a corpse. His analogy is that if the eye were an animal, sight would be its soul; the soul stands to the body as the ability to cut stands to an axe. On this view soul and body are not two things but the form and matter of one thing, inseparable in the way that the shape of a statue cannot exist apart from the bronze. When the body dies and disintegrates, its form (the soul) ceases too, just as the shape perishes when the statue is melted down.

The contrast is fundamental and structures the whole topic. Plato's soul is a distinct immaterial substance that can and does exist without the body, making personal survival straightforward but raising the problem of how an immaterial thing relates to a material one. Aristotle's soul is the form of the body, making the human being a genuine unity but apparently ruling out survival, since the form perishes with the matter it organises. (Aristotle's brief, obscure remarks that the intellect, nous, might be 'separable' complicate this, and were seized on by later thinkers, but his general position is that the soul does not survive the body.) A candidate who keeps this Plato-Aristotle contrast sharp has the backbone of every essay on the soul.

Worked example

Assessing Plato's affinity argument

Reconstruct Plato's affinity argument for immortality and give one strength and one weakness.

Premise 1
There are two kinds of thing: the visible, composite and perishable (bodies) and the invisible, simple and unchanging (the Forms).
Premise 2
The soul grasps the Forms by reason and is invisible and simple, so it is akin to the Forms, not to bodies.
Conclusion
Being akin to the indissoluble Forms, the soul does not dissolve at death; it is immortal.
Strength
It fits the observation that reason reaches truths (mathematics) that the senses cannot supply, suggesting a non-bodily faculty.
Weakness
It depends on the theory of the Forms, and 'akin to' the indissoluble does not strictly entail 'indissoluble' — a category resemblance is not a proof of immortality.

Result: Plato's affinity argument is suggestive but not conclusive: it rests on the contested theory of the Forms and infers immortality from a mere resemblance between the soul and the indissoluble Forms.

Typical mistakes

Treating Aristotle as a dualist like Plato — Aristotle denies the soul is a separate substance; it is the form of the body.
Presenting Plato's arguments for immortality without noting their dependence on the contested theory of the Forms.

Active revision

Explain the differences between Plato's and Aristotle's views of the soul. (Structured AO1 response)

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: GCE AS and A level subject content for religious studies (Department for Education)

Dualism and materialism (Descartes, Ryle, Dawkins)#

AdvancedAQA 7062/1 Section A: The self, death and the afterlifeDfE GCE Religious Studies subject content

Theories of mind and body

Fig. 2Positions range from Cartesian substance dualism through property dualism to materialism (identity, behaviourism, eliminativism).

René Descartes gives dualism its modern, rigorous form: substance dualism. In the Meditations he argues that mind and body are two entirely distinct substances. The essence of body (res extensa) is extension in space; the essence of mind (res cogitans) is thought. Through his method of doubt he finds he can doubt the existence of his body but cannot doubt that he is thinking ('I think, therefore I am'), so his essential self is a thinking thing that could in principle exist without the body. He supports this with the conceivability argument (I can clearly and distinctly conceive of mind without body, and whatever I can clearly and distinctly conceive God can bring about, so mind and body are really distinct) and the divisibility argument (body is divisible into parts but the mind is not, and things with different properties cannot be identical). If Descartes is right, the mind is a distinct immaterial substance and personal survival of bodily death is at least coherent.

Substance dualism faces two famous problems. The first is the interaction problem, pressed already by Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia: if mind is unextended and body is extended, how can they causally interact — how does an immaterial thought move a material arm, or a material injury cause immaterial pain? Descartes' suggestion that they meet in the pineal gland only relocates the mystery. The second is the private-language and other-minds difficulty: if the mind is wholly private and immaterial, how do we ever know other people have minds? These problems motivate the materialist alternative, which holds that there is only one kind of substance — the physical — and that mental states are either identical to, or wholly dependent on, brain states.

Gilbert Ryle, in The Concept of Mind (1949), attacks Cartesian dualism as a 'category mistake' and mocks it as 'the dogma of the ghost in the machine'. His famous example: a visitor shown the colleges, libraries and offices of a university who then asks 'but where is the university?' has mistakenly put the university in the same category as its buildings, when it is in fact the way they are organised. Similarly, Ryle argues, dualists mistakenly put the 'mind' in the same category as the body, as an extra ghostly thing, when talk of the mind is really talk about dispositions and patterns of behaviour — being intelligent is not possessing a private inner engine but behaving intelligently. There is no ghost in the machine because there is no separate thing for 'mind' to name; this is a form of philosophical (logical) behaviourism.

Richard Dawkins represents the scientific-materialist view that the 'soul' is at best a metaphor. On his account human beings are wholly physical: the mind is the functioning of the brain, a product of evolution, and there is no immaterial soul that could survive the brain's death; talk of the soul survives only as a poetic way of referring to human personality, aspiration and intellect ('soul' in the sense of soulful music), not as a real, separable entity. The strength of materialism is its consilience with neuroscience — the tight dependence of mental function on brain states (injury, drugs, dementia all alter the mind) strongly suggests the mind is what the brain does. Its difficulty is the 'hard problem' of consciousness: explaining how subjective experience (qualia — what it is like to see red or feel pain) arises from, or could just be, physical processes, which some (Chalmers, and property dualists) argue materialism cannot capture, leaving a foothold for a non-reductive view of mind.

Worked example

The interaction problem

Explain the interaction problem and assess whether it refutes Descartes' dualism.

State the dualist claim
Mind is unextended thinking substance; body is extended substance; they causally interact (thought moves the arm, injury causes pain).
Pose the problem
How can an unextended, non-physical thing act on an extended, physical thing, and vice versa? Physical causation seems to require contact and location, which the mind lacks.
Descartes' response
He located interaction in the pineal gland, but this merely names a site without explaining how immaterial and material meet.
Assess
The problem is serious but not strictly a disproof: it shows we cannot explain the interaction, not that it is impossible. Dualists (e.g. property dualists) may accept unexplained psychophysical laws.
Judgement
The interaction problem greatly weakens substance dualism and motivates materialism, but the hard problem of consciousness prevents materialism from being a clean victor.

Result: The interaction problem exposes a real, unresolved difficulty for substance dualism, pushing many towards materialism, but because materialism faces the hard problem of consciousness, dualism is weakened rather than refuted.

Typical mistakes

Confusing Descartes' substance dualism (two substances) with property dualism (one substance, two kinds of property) — the specification distinguishes them.
Treating the dependence of mind on brain as proving materialism; the dualist can accept close correlation while denying identity (correlation is not identity).

Active revision

'The mind is nothing more than the brain.' Assess this view. (Extended essay)

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: GCE AS and A level subject content for religious studies (Department for Education)

Personal identity and disembodied existence#

AdvancedAQA 7062/1 Section A: The self, death and the afterlifeDfE GCE Religious Studies subject content

Criteria of personal identity

Fig. 3The bodily and psychological criteria yield different requirements for survival: re-embodiment versus continuity of memory.

Any doctrine of survival must answer the question of personal identity: what makes the post-mortem individual the same person as the one who died? Two classic criteria compete. The bodily criterion holds that personal identity consists in the continuity of the same living body (or at least the same brain); on this view survival requires the persistence or re-creation of the body, and a purely disembodied 'me' is problematic. The psychological criterion, developed from John Locke, holds that personal identity consists in continuity of consciousness and memory — I am the same person as the boy who stole the apples because I can remember being him — so that, in principle, the same person could persist in a different body or even without a body, provided memory and character continue. Which criterion one adopts shapes which models of the afterlife are coherent.

The immortality-of-the-soul model (Plato, and in modified form much popular religion) fits the psychological criterion and substance dualism: the soul, carrying memory and character, survives the body's death and continues in a disembodied state. Its advantage is simplicity — nothing needs to be re-created; the soul simply carries on. Its difficulties are those of dualism itself (what is this immaterial soul, and how did it interact with the body?) plus the problem of imagining genuinely disembodied experience: can there be perception without sense-organs, action without a body, or a person recognisable as an individual with no bodily location? H. H. Price attempted to describe a coherent disembodied 'next world' as a world of mental images shared telepathically, but critics find such an existence either unintelligible or too thin to count as a full human life.

The problem of disembodied existence is sharpened by the observation that our concept of a person is thoroughly embodied. We identify, individuate and re-identify persons by their bodies; personality is expressed through face, voice and gesture; and much of what we value in relationships is bodily. A disembodied mind, even with intact memories, seems to lack the means of individuation (what distinguishes two disembodied minds with similar memories?) and of interaction (how do disembodied persons meet or communicate?). Defenders reply that these are limits of imagination, not of possibility, and that God could supply the conditions for disembodied persons to be individuated and to interact; but the burden is on them to show that 'disembodied person' is not, on our ordinary concept, close to a contradiction.

These difficulties push some towards the bodily criterion and hence towards resurrection rather than immortality of the soul as the more defensible model — the view that survival requires not a naturally immortal soul but the re-creation, by God, of the whole embodied person. This is the direction of biblical (as opposed to Platonic) thought, and of John Hick's replica theory, examined next. The choice between immortality of the soul and resurrection is thus not merely doctrinal but tracks the philosophical choice between the psychological and bodily criteria of identity, and a strong candidate makes that connection explicit rather than treating the afterlife models as a list.

Worked example

Does memory secure identity?

Assess the psychological (memory) criterion of personal identity as a basis for survival.

State the criterion
I am the same person over time in virtue of continuity of memory and character (Locke).
Attraction
It allows survival without the same body, so a soul or a resurrected replica carrying my memories would be me.
Reid's objection
Memory is not transitive: the old general remembers the young officer, who remembers the boy, but the general does not remember the boy — so memory-chains give a paradoxical identity.
Duplication objection
If memory alone constitutes identity, two future beings with my memories would both be me, which is incoherent — identity cannot be one-many.
Judgement
Memory continuity is necessary for recognisable survival but not sufficient for strict identity; this is exactly the problem Hick's replica theory must confront.

Result: The memory criterion makes disembodied or re-embodied survival conceivable but cannot alone guarantee strict identity, because of the transitivity and duplication problems — a gap that the replica theory inherits.

Typical mistakes

Ignoring personal identity and simply asserting 'the soul survives' — the identity question (what makes it the same person?) is where the evaluative depth lies.
Assuming disembodied existence is obviously coherent; the embodied character of our concept of a person is a serious obstacle.

Active revision

'A person cannot exist without a body.' Discuss. (Extended essay)

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: GCE AS and A level subject content for religious studies (Department for Education)

Resurrection, Hick's replica and reincarnation#

AdvancedAQA 7062/1 Section A: The self, death and the afterlifeDfE GCE Religious Studies subject content

Hick's replica theory

Fig. 4God re-creates the deceased as an exact, uniquely continuous replica in the resurrection world; the duplication objection threatens the identity claim.

The resurrection model, central to Judaism, Christianity and Islam, holds that survival is not the natural immortality of a soul but the re-creation by God of the whole embodied person after death. Human beings are not naturally immortal; they die completely, and their future life is a gift of God who raises them. This fits the bodily criterion of identity and the Hebraic view of the person as a psychosomatic unity (nephesh) rather than a soul in a body. St Paul, in 1 Corinthians 15, speaks of a 'spiritual body' — a transformed mode of embodiment, continuous with but not identical to the physical body ('it is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body'). The advantage of resurrection is that it takes embodiment seriously and does not require the problematic notion of a disembodied person; its difficulty is explaining how the resurrected body is the same person as the one who died, given that the original body has decayed.

John Hick's replica theory is a philosophical defence of the coherence of resurrection. Hick asks us to imagine, first, a man who disappears in London and instantly a physically and psychologically exact replica appears in New York — we would, he suggests, count the replica as the same person, since there is no rival candidate and perfect continuity of memory and character. Second, imagine the man dies in London and God creates the exact replica in a different 'space' (the resurrection world). Hick argues that, provided there is only one replica and it is continuous in memory and character with the deceased, it is rational to regard it as the same person resurrected, not merely a copy. Resurrection is thus the divine re-creation of the person as an exact replica in a new environment, and Hick claims this is a coherent, if not provable, conception of life after death.

The replica theory faces the duplication objection head-on: if God can create one exact replica, God could create two, and they cannot both be the original person, so being an exact replica cannot constitute identity — at best it constitutes an indistinguishable copy. Hick's stipulation that there is only one replica looks ad hoc, since the possibility of two is enough to show that replica-hood is not identity. A related worry is that even a single exact replica might be a new person qualitatively identical to the old one (a perfect copy) rather than the numerically same person who died — the difference between a restored original and a flawless forgery. Defenders reply that in the unique case, with divine authorship and full continuity, the distinction between 'same person' and 'perfect replica' may lack application, but critics regard this as evading rather than answering the objection.

Reincarnation (Hinduism) and rebirth (Buddhism) offer a third family of models: the individual is reborn into a new body, life after life, the moral quality of each life (karma) shaping the next, until liberation (moksha or nirvana). Hindu reincarnation involves a persisting self (atman) that transmigrates; Buddhist rebirth, strikingly, denies any permanent self (anatta) and describes rebirth as a causal continuity of psychological states, like one candle lighting another, with no unchanging soul passing across. These models raise their own identity problem (in what sense is the reborn individual 'me' if I remember nothing of my past life, and, for Buddhism, if there is no self at all?), and empirical claims of past-life memories are contested. Evaluating survival therefore means weighing three distinct pictures — disembodied soul, re-embodied resurrection/replica, and reincarnation/rebirth — each coherent only on certain assumptions about personal identity.

Worked example

The duplication objection to the replica theory

Reconstruct the duplication objection and assess Hick's reply.

Hick's claim
A unique exact replica, continuous in memory and character, re-created by God, is the same person resurrected.
The objection
If God can make one exact replica, God can make two; both would be equally continuous with the deceased, yet both cannot be identical to one person.
The consequence
So being an exact replica cannot constitute identity; at most it constitutes a perfect copy, and the original may simply have ceased.
Hick's reply
In the actual, unique case God makes only one, and with divine authorship the 'copy vs same person' distinction may lack application.
Assess
The reply is ad hoc: the mere possibility of two shows replica-hood is not identity, so the objection stands even if only one is in fact made.

Result: The duplication objection shows that being an exact replica cannot by itself constitute personal identity; Hick's 'only one is made' reply is ad hoc, so the replica theory establishes the conceivability of resurrection more than the strict identity of the raised person.

Typical mistakes

Conflating resurrection with immortality of the soul; the biblical resurrection is bodily re-creation, not a naturally immortal soul surviving.
Presenting Hick's replica as unproblematic; the duplication objection is the standard and serious criticism.

Active revision

'Hick's replica theory shows that resurrection is coherent.' Assess this claim. (Extended essay)

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: GCE AS and A level subject content for religious studies (Department for Education)

Is life after death coherent?#

AdvancedAQA 7062/1 Section A: The self, death and the afterlifeDfE GCE Religious Studies subject content

Immortality of the soul vs resurrection

Fig. 5The two theistic models differ on embodiment and on whether the person is naturally immortal or re-created by God.

A final judgement should assess coherence model by model, because the models fail and succeed at different points. Immortality of the soul is coherent only if substance dualism is defensible and disembodied personal existence is intelligible; both are in serious doubt — the interaction problem weakens dualism, and the embodied character of our concept of a person makes disembodied individuation and interaction hard to conceive. Resurrection, via Hick's replica theory, avoids disembodiment but stumbles on the duplication objection, which shows that exact re-creation secures at best a perfect copy rather than strict numerical identity. Reincarnation and Buddhist rebirth avoid some problems but face acute identity questions (survival without memory, and, for Buddhism, without a self). No model is free of difficulty, so the honest verdict is that coherent survival is not established with certainty by any of them.

This does not mean the doctrines are incoherent, however — a distinction the strongest answers preserve. The objections show that survival cannot be proved coherent and faces genuine puzzles, not that it is demonstrably impossible; each model has a defensible reply (dualists can accept unexplained psychophysical laws; Hick can appeal to the unique, divinely authored case; Buddhists can articulate identity as causal continuity without a self). The debate is therefore not 'coherent or incoherent' but 'how heavy is the burden of the puzzles, and are the replies ad hoc or principled?' — a matter of judgement on which reasonable philosophers divide, and where the materialist consilience with neuroscience presses on one side while the hard problem of consciousness presses on the other.

The coherence question is also entangled with the existence of God, which links this topic to the rest of the philosophy of religion. Resurrection presupposes a God with the power and will to re-create persons; immortality of the soul, in a religious context, presupposes a God who creates and sustains souls. So the credibility of life after death rests partly on the credibility of theism established (or not) by the earlier arguments and experiences: someone with independent grounds for believing in an omnipotent God has grounds for thinking resurrection possible (God could re-create the person, and the duplication worry is answered by God's not in fact making two), whereas someone who doubts God's existence has little reason to accept any survival model, since the naturalistic evidence (mind's dependence on brain) points the other way.

The most defensible overall judgement is proportioned and connected. Considered as a philosophical claim assessed on its own, life after death is not shown to be coherent beyond reasonable doubt: dualism and disembodiment are problematic, and the replica theory does not secure strict identity. Considered within a theistic framework already accepted on other grounds, resurrection is the most defensible model — it takes embodiment seriously, fits the psychosomatic view of the person, and its remaining puzzle (identity of the re-created person) is arguably answerable by appeal to God's unique action. So the question of survival cannot be settled independently of the question of God: for the theist, resurrection is a coherent hope; for the materialist, survival is an incoherent or at least evidentially unsupported one. A strong essay reaches this differentiated verdict rather than declaring survival simply coherent or simply impossible, and explicitly links it to the case for God.

Worked example

Model evaluation plan: is survival coherent?

Plan an essay judging whether life after death is coherent.

Thesis
No model is proved coherent independently, but resurrection is the most defensible within theism, so coherence depends on the case for God.
Soul model
Requires dualism (interaction problem) and disembodied persons (individuation/interaction problems) — heavily burdened.
Resurrection/replica
Avoids disembodiment but faces the duplication objection; Hick's unique-case reply is contestable.
Reincarnation/rebirth
Identity without memory (Hindu) or without a self (Buddhist) is problematic.
Judgement
Proportioned: not proved coherent on its own; resurrection is best within theism, so the verdict tracks one's view of God.

Result: Life after death is not demonstrably coherent as a stand-alone claim, but resurrection is the strongest model and becomes a coherent hope for the theist — so the coherence of survival cannot be judged apart from the case for God's existence.

Typical mistakes

Declaring life after death simply 'coherent' or 'impossible'; the defensible verdict is proportioned and varies by model and by prior belief in God.
Discussing survival without connecting it to the existence of God, when resurrection in particular presupposes a God able to re-create persons.

Active revision

'Life after death is not a coherent belief.' Evaluate this claim. (Extended essay)

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: GCE AS and A level subject content for religious studies (Department for Education)

Key points

Assessing Plato's affinity argument

Key points

The interaction problem

Key points

Does memory secure identity?

Key points

The duplication objection to the replica theory

Key points

Model evaluation plan: is survival coherent?

Sources

Self, death and the afterlife

Key points

Assessing Plato's affinity argument

Key points

The interaction problem

Key points

Does memory secure identity?

Key points

The duplication objection to the replica theory

Key points

Model evaluation plan: is survival coherent?

Sources