"In Defence of the Soul" - Dr Ralph Weir

On Wednesday 23 November at 4pm, in the Chapel of Pusey House as part of their “Recollection Series,” Dr Ralph Weir of the University of Lincoln asked what a culturally and scientifically informed person should think about the idea of the soul. He discussed a number of common misconceptions, and reflected on why the idea of the soul evokes such intense hostility in today's intellectual climate. He concluded by explaining why he thinks the idea of the soul is here to stay.
RALPH WEIR is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Lincoln, and an Associate Member of the Faculty of Theology and Religion at the University of Oxford.
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QUOTATIONS FROM THE PRESENTATION
1. Here is a staggering truth: the ontology of the human person currently embraced by the most vocal Christian scholars working on this issue is a view that almost no Christians thought plausible only 100 years ago. Until recently, the dominant view among Christian thinkers has been various forms of mind-body dualism… according to which the human person comprises body and soul. In stark disagreement, many contemporary Christian scholars vigorously advance anti-dualism and defend physicalism, understanding the human person as fundamentally physical. - Brandon Rickabaugh. Alister McGraph’s Anti-Mind-Body Dualism: Neuroscientific and Philosophical Quandaries for Christian Phyiscalism. Trinity Journal 40 (2019) 215-240. P. 215.
2. The enemy has sown spiritual errors by mingling with scriptur the vain and erroneous philosophy of the Greeks, especially of Aristotle… The soul in Scripture signifieth always either the life or the living creature; and the body and soul jointly, the body alive. - Hobbes, Leviathan Ch. xliv
3. Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell. - Matthew 10:28 (NIV)
4. We are always confident and know that as long as we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord… We are confident, I say, and would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord… For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each of us may receive what is due us for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad. - 2 Corinthians 5:6-10 (NIV)
5. It simply won’t do to demonstrate that the NT shows awareness of aspects of human life which appear to be non-material and to conclude from that that some kind of ‘dualism’ is therefore envisaged. - N. T. Wright, Mind, Spirit, Soul and Body: All for One and One for All ntwrightpage.c...
6. The fact [Paul in 2 Corinthians 12] can consider the possibility that the experience might not have been ‘in the body’ does indeed indicate that he can contemplate non-bodily experiences, but… I don’t think one can straightforwardly argue from this to what is now meant, in philosophical circles, by ‘dualism’ - N. T. Wright, Mind, Spirit, Soul and Body, ntwrightpage.c...
7. Paul is of course clear about… an intermediate existence… But he never names the psyche as the carrier of that intermediate existence… Had the earliest Christians wanted to teach that the ‘soul’ is the part of us which survives death and carries our real selves until the day of resurrection, they could have said so. But, with [a] solitary exception in Revelation [6.9], they never do. - N. T. Wright, Mind, Spirit, Soul and Body: All for One and One for All ntwrightpage.c...
8. [For Maimonides] the body and the soul are one unit… body and soul are one. - Avshalom Mizrahi, The Soul and the Body in the Philosophy of the Rambam, Rambam Maimonides Medical Journal 2.2 (2011).
9. When they spoke about souls they were not speaking of things that continue to exist as ghosts of material things that have passed away. What people like Maimonides and Halevi meant, when they said that something has a soul, is that the thing is alive. - Daniel Davies, Theories of the Soul in Medieval Jewish Thought jnjr.div.ed.ac...
10. In the world to come, there is no body or physical form, only the souls of the righteous alone, without a body, like the ministering angels. -Maimonides in Mishneh, Torah, Repentance 8, Chapter 8, trans. by Eliyahy Touger, Moznaim Publishing.
For a complete list, please see:
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Ralph Stefan Weir is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Lincoln and Associate Member of the Faculty of Theology and Religion at the University of Oxford.
Contact: [e-mail]