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Saturday, December 15, 2007

The soul: Folk views vs. philosophical reflections

Christopher Howse muses in Britain's Telegraph on the soul, while considering the work of the late philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe:
I'm not sure it matters all that much if people imagine that their souls are nebulous entities, like a better class of ghost. For at the same time, we seem quite capable of realising that it is each one of us who at heart acts well or despicably, and may be bound for heaven or for hell.
So we seem torn between the idea that our soul is something else (amorphously attached to us as bodily creatures), and the idea that our soul is the real us, which survives our bodily death to get its deserts in a future life.

Anscombe, who died in 2001, was a formidable Catholic interpreter of Wittgenstein.

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