In any complete analysis of what it means to be a living thing, souls matter

Souls Matter
by William Carroll


A materialist philosophy that denies the reality of immaterial features of the world is an impoverished view of nature, including human nature. In any complete analysis of what it means to be a living thing, souls matter. Without souls, there are no living things.

For one who thinks that there is nothing more to reality than what can be detected and explained by the empirical sciences, discourse about the soul, especially the human soul, remains at best a quaint reminder of outmoded views of nature, at worst an absurd hindrance to our knowledge of the world. In such a view, the title of this essay needs an apostrophe so that we might discuss the material makeup of what has traditionally been called a “soul.” My title, however uses “matter” as a verb, not as a noun.

For materialists, souls simply do not matter. Nevertheless, despite the sustained efforts of thinkers such as Paul Churchland, Daniel Dennett, and countless others, there continues to be a lingering sense that there is more to living beings than simply their material components. What this “more” might be remains a subject of contention.

Most discussions about souls focus on human souls, but human souls are only one kind of soul. The word “soul” (psyche in Greek, anima in Latin) traditionally refers to the key feature of living things that makes them be the living things that they are. Thus, for example, Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas speak of the souls of vegetables, of animals, and of human beings. Each kind of living thing has its own proper source of being alive, its own proper kind of soul. Indeed, each natural substance, whether living or not, has its own proper informing principle, its own source for being the kind of thing that it is. To speak of souls is to recognize a fundamental difference between the non-living and the living and, accordingly, to recognize a distinguishing source or principle for the living precisely as living.

In discussing human souls, those in the tradition of Platonic philosophy affirm a kind of dualism—that is, the view that human beings are composed of two distinct substances, body and soul. For many Christian authors, both ancient and contemporary, some version of “dualism” seems not only philosophically compelling, but theologically required in order to be consistent with the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. Among contemporary philosophers of mind, there are many who defend a dualistic understanding of human nature, with no reference to religious belief.

It is really dualism that is the object of criticism by those scientists and philosophers, working within a materialist understanding of the world, when they call into question the intelligibility of a “soul.” Dualism, however, is not the only understanding of human nature that employs the notion of a soul. As we shall see, Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas are not dualists, although they both affirm the existence of the soul.

• Empirical Science and Natural Philosophy

In a new book, The Soul Fallacy: What Science Shows We Gain by Letting Go of Our Soul Beliefs, Julien Mussolino, professor of psychology and member of the Center of Cognitive Sciences at Rutgers University, offers a sustained criticism of those whom he calls the “New Dualists.” His focus is on the human soul and, in particular, on its “detachability” from the body. The soul, understood in such terms, is for Mussolino “a scientific claim.” He writes:


Because belief in an immaterial soul represents a cluster of scientific hypotheses about physics, biology, and the sciences of the mind, determining whether we have souls is as objective a quest as answering questions about the origin of species or the age of the universe.

• The Natural Philosophy of Souls ...
• Consciousness, Mind, Will, and Soul ...
• The Incorruptibility of the Human Soul ...

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