BACKGROUND AND SOURCES

Most religions and pre-modern philosophies advance some idea of the soul. In ancient Hebrew thought the notion of nephesh refers to living things, but is most often used in connection with human beings, particularly in relation to characteristically human activities. Abstracting from these uses one gets the idea of soul as that which makes a living thing to be alive, and that is present in a body as a result of God’s having breathed this life principle (neshama) into it. Correspondingly, death is associated with the departure of this animating force. So conceived, soul is not as such a uniquely psychological concept, nor is its referent necessarily a personal entity, and there is no sense that it could exist as a separate substance. Later Jewish thought, both that contemporaneous with the first centuries of Christianity, but more so that of the Middle Ages, does speculate about an immaterial part or element of human beings, but as with Christian doctrines of the immortal soul this is the result of encounters with Greek metaphysics.

The principal philosophical sources of medieval speculation about the existence, nature, and possible immortality of the soul derive from the works of Plato and Aristotle, mediated through later Neoplatonic and Islamic interpreters and commentators. In the Meno and the Phaedo, Plato explores the idea of the soul as an immaterial substance that animates a body, but that is itself an independently existing intellectual subject. The latter status raises the possibility of the soul’s survival of its bodily partner’s death, and indeed of its intrinsic immortality (as well as of its possible pre-existence). Plato rehearses a number of arguments that involve the idea that intellectual knowledge is of non-material ‘objects’ and hence is itself an immaterial power, of an immaterial agent.