Augustine of Hippo: Soul and God

• Augustine was also known as Aurelius Augustinus.

Augustine of Hippo

• Augustine lived from November 13, 354 to August 28, 430.
• He was from Thagaste in Roman Africa, which is modern Souk Ahras in Algeria.
• The soul is conceived as the life-giving element and the center of consciousness, perception, and thought.
• Soul is ought to be the ruling part of a human being.
• Rational soul should control the sensual desires and passions.
• The soul can become wise if it turns to God.
• God is simultaneously the Supreme Being and the Supreme Good.
• Both God and the soul are material entities.
• The soul is a part of God that fell into the corporeal world, where it remains a foreigner, even to its own body.
• The soul is mutable in time but immutable in space, occupying a middle position between God and bodies.
• God is unchangeable and immaterial, while bodies are subject to temporal and spatial change.
• The soul is an incorporeal and immortal substance that can exist independently of a body.
• The soul is immortal because of God's inalienable presence within it.
• The soul is of divine origin and god-like, but it is not divine itself and created by God.
• The "greatness" of the soul refers to its vivifying, perceptive, rational, and contemplative powers.
• The soul's powers enable it to move close to God and are compatible with immateriality.
• Soul is a rational substance fitted for rule over a body.
• The soul must free itself from anything corporeal to be happy.
• It is natural and desirable for a soul to govern a body.
• True happiness is realized in the afterlife as a gift of God's grace.

René Descartes

• René Descartes was born on March 31, 1596, in La Haye, Touraine, France.
• René Descartes died on Feb. 11, 1650, in Stockholm, Sweden.
• René Descartes was a French mathematician, scientist, and philosopher.
• René Descartes is considered the father of modern philosophy.
• René Descartes was educated at a Jesuit college.
• His ambition was to introduce the rigor and clarity of mathematics into philosophy known as Cartesian philosophy.
• René Descartes wrote "Meditations on First Philosophy."
• René Descartes used Methodic doubt using a way to achieving certainty by systematically doubting everything.
• Descartes believed in mind and body dualism.
• Descartes contrasts a material body with a non-material mind.
• "Mind" is described as being like the "soul of Socrates".
• The mind is superior to the body, it is also the person's real self.
• Mental states occur in the mind.
• It is the mind that makes a person human.
• Extension is the attribute of the body; it has size and shape, is enduring, movable and changeable.
• The mind or soul is immaterial, non-extended, and thinks; the true self is a thinking thing, conscious of itself and its thinking.
• Doubt, understand, assert, deny, will, and imagine are all aspects of the "thinking thing".
• Knowledge of oneself as a subject of conscious states is the most certain knowledge anyone can have.
• "Cogito ergo sum" - "I think, therefore I am."
• Mind is capable of both thought and perception.
• Senses can be deceived.
• Mind and body are both substances that exist on their own, are unified and interacts.
• The soul is immortal.
• God sets up those particular relations between mind and body.

John Locke (1632–1704)

• John Locke was a British philosopher, an Oxford academic, and a medical researcher.
• A person can think self reflectively and think of itself as persisting over time as described by Locke.
• Persons can be held accountable for their actions.
• Because persons can think of themselves as persisting over time, they can plan ahead with future consequences in mind.
• Consciousness always accompanies thinking, which determines everyone's self.
• Consciousness determines the identity of the person.
• The mind is described as a "tabula rasa".
• Knowledge is based on careful observation of sense experience and memories of past experiences.
• Reason plays a role in understanding sense experience allowing for reasoning enabling intelligent conclusions.
• Knowledge originates in direct sense experience, acting as the final judgment of evaluating ideas.
• Personal identity can assessed by understanding what it means to be a person.
• A person is viewed as a thinking, intelligent being with the abilities to reason and reflect
• A person considers itself to be the same thing across time and places.
• Consciousness accompanies thinking and an essential part of the thinking process.
• Consciousness makes possible the belief that we are the same identity in different times and places.
• Locke denies that the individual self necessarily exists in a single soul or substance.
• The essence of the self is conscious awareness of itself as a thinking, reasoning, reflecting identity.
• The self is not necessarily embedded in a single substance or soul but can reside in multiple.
• Conscious awareness and memory of previous experiences are keys to understanding the self.
• Coherent sense of personal identity comes from awareness of self when thinking, feeling, and willing.