Monday, January 31, 2011

Eros: body or soul? part 2, Note 1

My argument is by giving suggestive examples. (I don't think I can give a more rigorous argument without a definition of "body" and "soul" to start from.) The first one I owe to Mark Twain, who asked famously whether the mind can remain sober while the body is drunk. More contemporaneously, it is well known that hospital patients who maintain a positive and hopeful attitude (a disposition of the soul) heal faster (in their bodies) than patients suffering from the same thing, who don't. People who experience chronic, unremitting pain (in their bodies) are more likely than others to develop attitudes (in their souls) of crabbiness, bitterness, and melancholy. There are drugs that can be given to the body which change a patient's mood or personality. And so on. Any dualism of soul-body or mind-body which can survive these examples is too impractical to be much use in this argument.

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