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This chapter is devoted to Phaedo. It attempts to explicate the account of the person in that dialogue along with the proofs for the immortality of the soul. In this dialogue, along with the claim for the immortality of the soul the separation of Forms is found and the consequent demotion of the reality of the sensible world. It is within this context that the relation between embodied and disembodied persons is properly situated. This relation is understood as one between endowed and achieved personhood or selfhood. It is shown that for Plato, the ideal person is a knower, the subject of the highest form of cognition. That this form of cognition is apparently attributable only to disembodied persons is of the utmost importance. From this, it follows that the achievement of any embodied person is bound to fall short of the ideal.

In the 13th century, natural philosophy changed status from an enterprise of marginal significance into one that formed the principal point of entry into the understanding of the world and our place in it. This was effected through the introduction of Aristotelianism into the University of Paris at the beginning of the 13th century where, in its new role as a philosophical foundation for systematic theology, natural philosophy became the single point of entry into natural knowledge of the natural and supernatural realms. The compatibility of Aristotelian natural philosophy was never wholly resolved, however, and matters came to a head at the beginning of the 16th century on the question of the immortality of the soul, where Aristotelian natural philosophy and Christian teaching were in conflict. In many ways, this conflict, which centred around the work of Pomponazzi, provided a model for the later Copernicanism disputes.

This chapter examines the disputed relationship between Ambrose’s theology and Neoplatonic philosophy, with specific reference to his account of the identity of the person. One controversial passage is from On the Good of Death, where Ambrose, paraphrasing Ennead IV.7, appears to claim that an individual’s identity lies in the soul and that the body is not a constitutive element of the self. It will be argued that Ambrose’s dichotomization of soul and body in On the Good of Death and his appropriation of Plotinus reflect his understanding of the human condition after its corruption by sin, described based on his interpretation of Romans 7.

Discusses possible reasons for Descartes's move to the Netherlands, and his avoidance of patronage there. Considers his work on optics (including the sine law of refraction and the grinding of hyperbolic lenses), music, and metaphysics (arguments for the existence of God, his transcendence, and the immortality of the soul). Also deals with Descartes's construction of an artificial, universal language, changes in his thinking about the doctrine of clarity and distinctness, his solution to the Pappus problem, his classification of curves, and his work on meteorology that he expanded into a project to explain the whole of physics. This work was considerably slowed down by his dispute with Beeckman over the authorship of ideas.

This chapter investigates Gregory of Nyssa’s understanding of the soul in his dialogue De Aanima et Rresurrectione. This text has often been interpreted against the backdrop of Platonic doctrine. Close attention to Gregory’s wording and especially his use of the concept of power (dynamis) in this connection, however, shows that his argument is better explained on the basis of the doctrine of the resurrection of the body which he set out to defend in his treatise.

Near the end of his Enquiry concerning Human Understanding David Hume declared that the ‘best and most solid foundation’ of divinity and theology was ‘faith and divine revelation’. Many other passages can be found where Hume uses similar fideist arguments to criticize the application of philosophical reason to religious questions. The question addressed in this chapter is how Hume’s criticism of the use of philosophy in religious and theological argument compares to the beliefs of his contemporaries on the same subject. In particular, it examines his intellectual relationship with the two main groups within the mid-eighteenth-century Presbyterian Kirk, the ‘Orthodox’ and the ‘Moderates’. Claiming that the fideist language used by Hume was not as similar to the position of orthodox Presbyterians as has sometimes been suggested, the chapter also argues that Hume’s sceptical, fideist arguments about philosophy and religion were closer to the beliefs of these Moderates, including Hutcheson, Leechman, Robertson, and Blair, than has often been realized. Nevertheless, they and Hume differed significantly in their explanations for the emergence of religious belief in human societies.