The Soul

The second preliminary is this: We should interpret a biblical passage in light of what its original audience would have understood it to mean. Now it is widely acknowledged that people all over the world throughout the ages have been substance dualists who depict life after death as involving the departure of the soul. This belief predates the bib

So understood, it is actually a form of property dualism. Structural supervenience is the view that mental properties are structural properties entirely constituted by the properties, relations, parts, and events at the subvenient level. Functionalism is currently the most popular version of structural supervenience.

Second, a substance is a continuant—it can change by gaining new properties and losing old ones, yet it remains the same thing throughout the change.

Case 2: The Walking Dead is a very popular television show today. In the first season’s final episode, a scientist shows a group of ordinary people a video of the inside workings of a live human brain. It looks like a complex web of wires and nodes, with a multitude of flashing lights traveling to and fro. He then declares matter-of-factly that all

(SS) Mental properties supervene on physical properties, in that necessarily any two things (in the same possible world or in different possible worlds with the same laws of nature) indiscernible in all physical properties are indiscernible in mental properties.

French philosopher Blaise Pascal rightly remarked that the soul’s nature is so important that one must have lost all feeling not to care about the issue.

Ruach clearly overlaps with nephesh. However, two differences seem to characterize the terms. First, ruach is overwhelmingly the term of choice for God (though it is also used of animals; cf. Eccl. 3:19; Gen. 7:22) and, second, ruach emphasizes the notion of power. Indeed, if there is a central thread to ruach, it appears to be “a unified center of

Ezekiel 37 is parallel to Gen. 2:7 in which God breathes neshamah—a virtual synonym of ruach that means “the breath of life”—into an already formed body. In both texts, the entity God adds is (1) that which animates and makes alive, (2) something that is added by God and is non-emergent. The ruach is something that can depart upon death (Ps. 146:4;

Substance dualists are also property dualists, because substance dualists believe that both the ego and consciousness itself are immaterial.