Well, everyone will either find out eventually, or won’t have anything left of themselves to consider the question with, so no big deal.
It seems to me to be only a topic of immediate concern if you believe that you will be punished for having the wrong beliefs about having a soul.

This is at the top of my list of books I want someone-smarter-than-me to write: A philosophical history of the concept of the soul. It seems to me that the term and idea has gone through a lot of changes over time, but with very little explicit recognition of that fact. Plato always seemed to basically mean “mind,” best I can tell. But what did Christian theology add to that concept, if anything, and is it consistent? Eventually we clearly do get to the “New Age treacle”–a difficult inheritance to overcome. On one level, I think the New Agey idea is that the soul is “that most unique part of ourselves,” which might very well be true from a more rigorous Christian perspective. But then wrap in all the “soul energy” stuff as described in that article and I think it becomes clear that we don’t really in modern times have any idea what the hell we mean by a “soul.”

The problem is with the word. Soul has a lot of implications that go beyond phenomena. If you are dealing with a something that is not part of the physical body and can leave it, yes, it exists. And it is possible to empirically prove the existence of that in the laboratory.
Ok, we can forget the 19th century silliness about weighing a person right after he died. There is something much better and we learned it through remote viewing. The proof that remote viewing works is not in the bad pictures that are constanty shown. The proof is that if you put a magnetometer in a sealed chamber and the viewer accurately penetrates the chamber, the magnetometer will go crazy. And this is 100 per cent repeatable.
But it gets better. If you seal a video recorder in that chamber, you will get something on the video. That is not as strong a proof as the magnetometer because the something varies too much but it does occur. And I can assure you, there is something really strange about looking at a video and seeing something of you on it even though you were on the other side of town when it was recorded.

I wonder whether “soul” is not integrity. Not moral integrity (though that is part of it), but integrity as unity — as a hanging togetherness — as our functioning as a coherent whole in our manifest modes of being (moral being, economic being, biological being, and more.
Soul as our being integrally human across the board, soul as that which is threaten when we loose our integrity in any aspect of ourselves, be it moral integrity (honesty), economic integrity (frugality), or biological integrity (health). That loss of integrity in any of these areas puts a strain on all toe others.
That to say we have souls (integrity) is to say that we are souls (integrated beings). That to lose one’s soul (integrity) is to lose one own self — to dis-integrate.
That the loss of soul is dissolution. It is to become nothing — a no-thing (although we in our integrity are more than things). That the loss of soul is death.
FWIW, that is my own best understanding of “soul” at the moment. How well this accords with the writings of theologians, philosophers, and the prophets, may be answered by theologians, philosophers, and prophets. I am an eager listener.

As one who make frequent forays (don’t forget misquito repellent!) into New Age concepts and discussions, I want to add my voice to Charles [emphasis added FE]: The problem is with the word. Soul has a lot of implications that go beyond phenomena.
Many (I want to say most, but that’s always problematic) Pagans distinguish (clearly or vaguely) between the energy of existence (magic[k], spellcraft, healing, etc.) and the soul. We (not always consistently) stick with soul as an attribute of personal identity. We debate (argue) about the source, about what it carries (the Celtic variation of reincarnation is a big one), and many use the terms “soul” and “spirit” interchangeably.
In my opinion, one of the required tasks of philosophers is to recognize, acknowledge and facilitate the border between concept and phenomenon. I also believe we should offer them at least minimal sympathy for the barrel of worms into which they must dig.

The proof is that if you put a magnetometer in a sealed chamber and the viewer accurately penetrates the chamber, the magnetometer will go crazy. And this is 100 per cent repeatable.
Seriously? Do you have a link to this?

The concept of soul is problematic not for philosophy as such, but for contemporary Anglo-American “analytic” philosophers who have cut themselves off from the philosophical tradition. For the ancients, soul was what the living had that the dead didn’t, whether it be a person or an animal or a plant. So the genuine question is what makes the human soul distinctive in relation to other kinds of souls. Plato and Aristotle agreed that it was above all something they called “nous”–rather mistakenly translated as “mind”–but by general agreement the part of the soul able to be in contact with eternal, truly intelligible realities, and hence perhaps itself in some sense eternal.

To paraphrase what Flannery O Conner said about the Eucharist, if the soul is just a metaphor, then to hell with it.
As Camus said, there’s only one meaningful philosophical question: Should I commit suicide? And if the soul isn’t real, then there’s no particular reason to answer ‘No’.
I don’t want happy feelings, I want ‘the water of life, of which he who drinks shall never thirst again’ (if I’m quoting that correctly).

I’m an atheist, but boy do I have no time for this guy Asma. His construction “If we professors hear this language…” is too precious by half — both condescending, and falsely including lots of religious, believing professors who don’t at all agree with him; that, along with his compulsion to use tortured phrases like “truant evidence” and “lack of warrant,” signal that it’s safe to stop listening to him.
Rod,
I’m bummed to see you adducing those life-after-death experiences as any sort of proof. Neuroscience is continually providing new explanations for why they’re understandable as chemical starbursts in a dying brain. (Even if that brain then gets brought to life by good ol’ science.)
Franklin,
You’re a pagan? That’s interesting, I never met (er, “met”) one before.
Charles,
I, too, would like to know more about those magnetometer and videotape experiments. I’ll try Googling them later (no time now) but if you can provide any leads at least a couple of us will be grateful.
M.

Marifasus, I suggest that Gus diZerega’s post at http://blog.beliefnet.com/apagansblog/2009/11/twelve-things-you-probably-didnt-know-about-pagans.html as an excellent starting place. For the best overview of Pagan organizations (such as they are) in the US and the world, I also suggest browsing Margot Adler’s* Drawing Down the Moon. Her book covers the diversity and internal chaos of the modern paganism movements very well.
* Yes, that Adler, the NPR journalist.

What’s really shocking here is that trained philosopher is using an outdated and discredited positivism to dismiss metaphysics.
Also, Rod, the Templeton Foundation should look at funding the work of Mario Beauregard at the University of Montreal. He has designed some interesting experiments to look at this issue, but last I heard still needed funding for them.

The “out of the body” experience is caused by build-up of excessive CO2 in the brain.
Despite being the hard-core atheist that I am, I am actually open-minded to the possibility that human consciousness does survive death of the physical body. However, I cannot help but notice that old people who claim to believe in any of these life after death religious beliefs do not look forward to the “transition” the same way a high school senior looks forward to graduation and moving on in life. If they themselves do not actually believe in (and look forward) to moving on with life in the afterlife, how can they expect someone like me to share this worldview?

To me, it’s consciousness, the individual spark from God that animates us, makes us think and feel and experience and ponder and worship the divine, the part that makes us uniquely us. It survives after death and returns to God, where it remains and will probably be joined with our perfected physical bodies at some point. I doubt it is physically present in the body or can be measured.
There is one tribe in this state that believes the soul actually has four parts which go in different places after death. Most cultures seem to have some concept of the soul.

As for Near Death Experiences, I’ve talked to people who have had them and they regarded them as life-changing events. There’s undoubtedly a physical explanation for them but that doesn’t rule out that those experiences are actually real in a spiritual sense as well. Science explans how, it doesn’t explain WHY.

This prof is being condescending to believers.

Bryan,
The idea that a collection of matter that is connected so as to ‘hang together’ and become a whole thing additional to the sum of its parts is actually a fairly widely-held philosophical view. Spinoza expresses a view like this in the Ethics. Two sorts of things have this property: animals, and the world as a whole. Spinoza seemed to think there’s a kind of organic unity and activity (maybe even intelligence) to the natural world – expressing his appreciation for the unity and elegance of physical natural laws.
Contemporary philosophers of mind sometimes say that consciousness and thought are ‘emergent’ properties of matter, indicating that such properties are somehow irreducible to basic physical properties.
However, such souls as these neither survive death, nor do they, without additional analysis, maintain personal identity over time. So, they don’t fit the religious conception.
In some ancient texts (particularly Aristotle), ‘soul’ means something like the property of being animated, or being self-moving.
None of these notions of souls is going to satisfy the religious, who want a single unchanging entity to explain personal identity given physical change over time, and life after death. So, they posit a non-physical soul that endures through change and death.
The interaction problem – between non-physical souls and physical bodies is extraordinarily difficult. If you think about it, it’s a special case of the problem of miracles. Here’s a way of stating the problem: If miracles are the temporary suspension of physical laws, then there are no physical laws. Soulful interactions with physical bodies require in the temporary suspension of physical laws. They preempt purely physical causes.
Explaining away what is metaphysically controversial about souls obscures the disagreement between those who believe in miracles, and those who do not. It is the crux of the fundamental disagreement between those with scientific assumptions, and those who reject them.
It is the job of philosophers as teachers to, in this order, (i) make fundamental disagreements as clear and bright as possible, and *only then* (ii) muddy the waters.
For example, I’ve always found that the notion of a non-physical soul actually does very little, in itself, to help explain life after death. After all, God could recreate and endlessly maintain physical persons, after death, in places physically unconnected to our (living) natural world. And if God is all-powerful, etc., such a system is as explanatory and more metaphysically parsimonious that tries to relate physical bodies and non-physical souls. It’d be true that the recreated body would be a clone, with no identity relation between it and the original. But that may evidence a prejudice in favor of metaphysical identity and against other possibly more important properties, like the continuity of memory and character.

The problem is that lots of people have never seriously asked themselves: what does “physical” or “material” mean?

If I didn’t know any better, I would simply view Asma’s essay as a coded salvo in the internecine warfare being waged within philosophy departments right now. Over the past few decades, theistic thinkers have increasingly come to hold sway within these departments at high-level institutions. This is obviously dismaying to those “sold out” to a positivist or materialist viewpoint. This essay seems like a sly attempt at winning a skirmish, or, really, not so sly, as the opening sentence gives the game away: “No self-respecting professor of philosophy wants to discuss the soul in class.” This is an attempt at “othering” any philosophy professor who DOES want to discuss the soul, and I’d say it’s a safe bet there are increasing numbers of younger faculty members who do.

Out of the body can also be induced by ingesting psilocybin muchrooms. Psilocybin also creates feelings of spirituality that are identical to those described by both Abrahamic and Eastern metaphysical religions. It is obviously a neuro-chemical effect.
Human consciousness does correlate with neuro-structure. Brain injury affects cognition and emotional states. Also, there are cases where people have fallen into frozen lakes and rivers and have been revived after 30-40 minutes of being clinically “dead” (cessation of neuro-electrical activity), meaning that human consciousness does not based on continuous electrical activity. The fact that such people have survived such exposure with no permanent effect suggests that human consciousness does “remain with the body” as long as the neuro-structure remains intact, even if it is inactive.

Cheers, Franklin.

Houghton,
Maybe that’s it, but I doubt it. It’s been my experience that the war-lines just don’t cut along those issues. It’s more about the divisions between continental philosophers, analytic philosophers, and historians of philosophy. The division between theists and atheists are nothing compared to these.
Here’s an alternative explanation: soul talk tends to lead to awkwardness. Every time souls come up in the intro classes I taught, the notion of a soul-mate comes up. Sigh.
What do you do? Awkwardly explain that souls, in Descartes’ context, are not about that? Add that and even if they were it wouldn’t matter because love is about working and understanding and compromise and commitment, which are not passive properties of souls like locks and keys that are made to fit each other? And do this in the presence of a bunch of emotionally romantic 18-20 year olds, some of whom are already coupled off in the classroom? Or maybe patronize them, and say, “Yes, soul mates, very good, but…”
Believe me, it’s awkward, and not in any theologically interesting way.

John Milton in his work On Christian Doctrine (1674)argued Scripturally that the human soul can die. Commenting on Genesis 2:7, he wrote: “When man had been created in this way, it is said, finally: thus man became a living soul. . . . He is not double or separable: not, as is commonly thought, produced from and composed of two different and distinct elements, soul and body. On the contrary, the whole man is the soul, and the soul the man.” Milton then posed the question: “Does the whole man die, or only the body?” After presenting an array of Bible texts showing that all of man dies, he added: “But the most convincing explanation I can adduce for the death of the soul is God’s own, Ezek[iel 18:]20: the soul which sins shall itself die.” Milton also cited such texts as Luke 20:37 and John 11:25 to show that dead mankind’s hope lies in a future resurrection from the sleep of death.

Re: However, I cannot help but notice that old people who claim to believe in any of these life after death religious beliefs do not look forward to the “transition” the same way a high school senior looks forward to graduation and moving on in life.
When you graduate from high school you don’t face losing contact with your friends and family. True, in the afterlife we will be reunited with those who have died before us, but we will also be separated from those we love here, and from the whole beautiful Earth.
Re: The “out of the body” experience is caused by build-up of excessive CO2 in the brain.
That’s a hypothesis only– there’s nothing to prove it. It should not be asserted as a fact. By the way I have asthma. There have been times I have quite breathing. That is NOT a delightful experience: no tunnels of light, no heavenly serenity, no reunions with my parents. Being unable to breathe yields nothing more than pure panic.

John T,
Milton wasn’t an orthodox Christian in any sense of the word- he subscribed to Arianism, much like today’s Unitarians, and held that Christ was a created being instead of being eternally begotten of the Father. As such, his views on souls dying, on divorce, or on any number of other things are very far from being normative Christian doctrine.
I mean, Milton also held that men should be allowed to divorce their wives at the drop of the hat, but did not extend similar right to women. I doubt many Christians would follow him there, so it’s unclear why they would follow him on the matter of souls dying.
As Jon points out, there are a number of naturalistic hypotheses about near death experience, but as yet we don’t KNOW for sure what causes them (even leaving aside issues about proximmate vs. final causation- if God wants to signal his presence through cutting off oxygen to your brain, he can do that). I find the naturalistic hypotheses fairly unconvincing, and the most reasonable explanation to me is that they are what they appear to be, i.e. visions of the divine. I’ve had similar visionary experiences, though not in a near death state, which is part of the reason I’m a Christian today.

Hector,
I was not commenting on John Milton’s view of the Trinity but rather the Bible’s view of the soul. There has been a small miniority of devout Christians (perhaps not “othodox”) since the first century that have shared similar views to Milton. Such as The Polish Brethren, The Socinians and Isaac Newton to name a few.
By the way Issac Newton in his writings argues that Arius expounded the Truth and Athanasius teaching was a corruption of the original teaching of Christ and the Apostles.
Such scriptures as Ecclesiastes 9:5,10 lead them to this conclusion about the soul- “For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten.”
“Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest”

John T,
You’re quoting Ecclesiastes on the mortality of the soul. Ecclesiastes?? Really?? I can tell you right up front, you’re not going to find much knowledge about the soul there. The whole _point_ of Ecclesiastes is that it’s a vision of what the world would be like if God didn’t exist, and of the futility and meaninglessness of mortal things.
In any case, the Jewish teaching about the soul evolved- the Jews in Moses’ time didn’t believe all the same things that the Jews in Antiochus’ time believed. One of the matters in which their beliefs evolved was on the immortality of the soul. Early Judaism did not stress the afterlife to the same extent as later Judaism and Christianity. So you would do much better to consult the later Jewish texts like Daniel and Maccabees, which _do_ teach the immortality of the soul. Second Maccabees, for example, (I think) states that Antiochus’ soul was in hell at the time the book was written, not just that he would enter hell at judgment day. I don’t know why God chose to reveal the truth about the soul to the people of Israel in bits and pieces, but C.S. Lewis has some interesting thoughts on this in his ‘Reflections on the psalms.’
And no, Arius was not correct, give me a break. John said, “In the beginning was the Word….and the Word was God,” which does not allow us to assume that the Word was a created being.

The Encyclopaedia Judaica states: “Only in the post-biblical period, did a clear and firm belief in the immortality of the soul take hold . . . and become one of the cornerstones of the Jewish and Christian faiths.” It also states: “The personality was considered as a whole in the biblical period. Thus the soul was not sharply distinguished from the body.” The early Jews believed in the resurrection of the dead, and this “is to be distinguished from the belief in . . . the immortality of the soul,” points out that encyclopedia.
The Encyclopaedia Judaica further admits that “it was probably under Greek influence that the doctrine of the immortality of the soul came into Judaism.”
Nevertheless, devout Jews up until the time of Christ still believed in and looked forward to a future resurrection. We can see this from Jesus’ conversation with Martha at the death of her brother Lazarus: “Martha therefore said to Jesus: ‘Lord, if you had been here my brother would not have died.’ . . . Jesus said to her: ‘Your brother will rise.’ Martha said to him: ‘I know he will rise in the resurrection on the last day.’”—John 11:21-24.
And as for the book of Daniel consider the following scriptures:
Daniel 12:2 “And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.”
Daniel 12:13-“But go thou thy way till the end be: for thou shalt rest, and stand in thy lot at the end of the days”

On the now closed atheism thread, contributor “reticon” offered this question (posed by another contributor) and answer [emphasis added FE]:
“After all…what kind of deity would allow such suffering to be inflicted on an infant such as this?”
A Deity that recognizes, from a vastly different perspective than our own, the brevity of human life, and the superiority of eternal life in the place of said perspective.
Earlier, I posited that deity is a concatenation of subjective, human referents. Selfishly wishing the previous thread had stayed open, but also recognizing a strong connection to this thread’s topic, I offer the same position: Definitions of soul are concatenations of human referents attempting to created links to deity.
The bolded phrase is key. There are two broad categories to examine. Those who anthropomorphize deity and invest it/him/her/them with human characterisitics, and those who see deity as unformed or with some combination of non-human attributes (animal, plant, etc.)
In the end, a human soul is one or the other. It is part and parcel of what it means to be human, or it is some sort of extension of deity that contains one or more non-human attributes. I submit that this is the primary point of conflict, from which the rest of the arguments obtain their energy.

“I see Asma’s point about the impossibility of proving empirically that the soul exists — though I wonder what he would make of the many, many testimonies made by people who have experienced clinical death, but have been revived by doctors and returned with stories of having floated above their bodies and seen what was happening. Many of these people relate accurate physical descriptions of what they saw, things they couldn’t have already seen.”
Sorry, but no. This is absurd. Here’s a guy who studies this stuff:
http://www.skeptiko.com/kevin-nelson-skeptical-of-near-death-experience-accounts/
I’m well aware that I’m pulling a source with an anti-religion bias here. I did so because it was the quickest and easiest to find. If you look around a little more you can find publications in peer reviewed journals that offer mundane explanations for near death experiences. There’s nothing mysterious here.
Near death experiences present no “problem” for atheists. There are perfectly good explanations for these events, and honestly, it seems disingenuous to pull silly, easily debunked nonsense into this conversation. If you think this is a conversation that should be had, it should be had with skepticism and humility.
Last week I participated in a project about teaching qualitative reasoning in college writing classes. A lot of what we did was to score freshman papers to see whether the kids at our school new if they could recognize when they needed to look for data. There was a little box to check if we saw stuff like “many, many” being used as evidence for a claim. As you did here.
Again, I’m not saying making any claims about souls here. I am making the claim that there are “lots” of testimonies about amazing stuff out there doesn’t do much. There are “many, many” claims about alien abductions too, as there were once “many, many” claims about ritual Satanic abuse. There are “many, many” claims about psychics being able to know things they shouldn’t be able to know.
You’re supposed to be the “smart religion guy.” Come on. Don’t be credulous. The end of your post suggests that for you, philosophy’s limits don’t let you know stuff about the soul. That’s an appropriate attitude. I agree that deductive reasoning won’t get you there. So why introduce the pseudo science? If philosophy sucks at talking about souls, how is empiricism supposed to be better?
This is what frustrates atheists and makes us not take you seriously. If religion, or faith, allows you to think thoughts that you find valuable, then argue from that perspective. Hey, I’m fascinated by religion and try to take it seriously. When people (like you usually do) argue, “faith adds meaning to the world,” and explain how, then I’d love to talk. When you say “I think I’ve found evidence for the supernatural!” When you do that you sound like a rube.
Again, my reaction is relevant ONLY because you put forth this “evidence” as a “problem” for people who don’t believe in spirits. It is no such thing. Pull out Occam’s Razor, and then assume that you are a secular person. Is it more likely that near death experiences are a product of tricks of the memory combined combined with hallucinations brought about by brain trauma (by the way, if you spin somebody around real fast so that they pass out from lack of blood in the brain, they will sometimes have a near death experience), or that near death experiences reveal that you are actually a ghost that inhabits the meat of your body.
No offense. I’m bothering to write because I like your work. I appreciate the conversation you are participating in, and we need more like it. But you need to be aware of what the boundaries are. It’s really easy to debunk this stuff, so you’d do well to leave it alone. OR you can frame it as “this is my faith-based opinion of near death experiences.” You can believe whatever you want about death. It’s the context here that’s offensive.
Some have argued that the biological things that happen at death are physiologically explainable, but that they are a symptom of grace, since brain death produces hallucinations that are comforting. I don’t think that’s proof of anything, but it’s interesting and worth talking about. If we explain something as being grace, does that make it so? We can’t REALLY know God, but perhaps our bodies offer us experiences that might help us understand? Neat. I’d love to talk about THAT. I don’t see a problem with that. Joyce said God was a “shout in the street.” If there is such a thing as God, that definition seems like a starting place for talking about whatever it is.

Many of these people relate accurate physical descriptions of what they saw, things they couldn’t have already seen.
No, actually, none of them do – there are no verifiable cases of “out of body” near-death experiences where anybody actually, personally reports an accurate physical description of something they “couldn’t have” seen. What stories exist are always anecdotes that happened to someone else, at some other hospital – or the bar for “couldn’t have seen it” is fairly low. I mean, I can “see” myself on the operating table, right now, with the surgeons wrist-deep in my viscera, despite having never in my life undergone surgery. But I’m able to imagine what it would look like if I were under the knife, because of the popularity of medical TV shows.
None of the stories you’re thinking of have actually held up to inspection. They’re apocryphal, not factual.

Over at UU Salon, the question of the month this month is: “What is a Soul?” So far 11 Unitarian Universalists have responded. My response included the following statement, which reasonably summarizes my take on soul:
Since the soul is an abstraction from experience of individual existence, it does not exist before or after the individual except as myth or metaphor. And there is nothing wrong with myth and metaphor and abstraction except when we mistake them for objectively real phenomena rather than as functions of language and culture.
If language all had to be literal to be meaningful, it would be a pretty poor world. But when humans mistake their figures of speech for reality, they have dropped through the rabbit hole, from which it can be very difficult to climb out.