Online research in philosophy

Cartesian or substance dualism is the view that concrete substances come in two basic kinds. There are material things, such as biological organisms. These may be either simple or composed of parts. And there are immaterial things--minds or souls--which are always simple. No material thing depends for its existence on any soul, or vice versa. And only souls can think.

Epistemology and the Psychology of Personality I; [n his discussion of publication trends in contemporary personality psychology, Hogan () noted that; ...

Aristotle's definition of the soul should be interpreted as: 'the soul is the entelechy of a natural body that serves as its instrument'.

Souls play a huge part in the Harry Potter story. Voldemort creates six Horcruxes, thereby dividing his own soul into seven parts, and Harry must destroy all of the Horcruxes before Voldemort can die. At different points in the books, several main characters (Harry, Sirius, and Dudley) narrowly avoid having their souls sucked out of them by a dementor; Barty Crouch, Jr., does not escape this fate. So what is the soul? In Harry Potter’s world, it is clear that people have souls, and that these souls generally survive bodily death. But it is not entirely obvious how souls work and what their nature is. Over the centuries, philosophers and theologians have proposed various different accounts of the soul, and have argued about which is an accurate picture. In this chapter, I will survey some of the major philosophical accounts of the soul before turning to the question of how souls work in Rowling’s books and whether her picture of the soul is plausible.

Here the distinguished philosopher Ian Hacking uses the MPD epidemic and its links with the contemporary concept of child abuse to scrutinize today's moral...

During an out-of-body experience (OBE), one sees the world and one's own body from an extracorporeal visuospatial perspective. OBEs reflect disturbances in brain systems dedicated to multisensory integration and self-processing. However, they have traditionally been interpreted as providing evidence for a soul that can depart the body after death. This mystical view is consistent with Bering's proposal that psychological immortality is the cognitive default.

Introduction -- Am I alone in my body? -- Multiple personality -- Personal identity -- Diachronic identity -- What am I fundamentally? -- Empirical discernability and fission -- My body -- The various senses of personal identity -- Multiple personality and individuation -- Morton Prince's seminal case study the dissociation of a personality -- Philosophical theories of multiple personality -- The coexistence thesis -- Sharing my body -- A criterion of individuation -- Multiple personality in therapeutic and biographic discourses -- Multiple personality in literary discourses.