There is a major debate in philosophy called the mind and body debate. This is the debate about what gives us our personal identity as to whether it is our minds, our bodies or whether it is both. A number of philosophers have commented on the mind and body debate. These are dualists, monists and materialists all of which have theories explaining what gives us our personal identity. Dualists believe that the mind and body are separate, monists believe that the mind and body are one but can be separated and materialism is the view that there is no such thing as a mind or a soul and that when we die we die.
Philosophers such as Plato and Descartes are dualists. In this dualist argument, Plato presents four arguments for the immortality of the soul which are cyclical – everything comes into existence from its opposite which sets up the cycle of birth and death, recollection- Plato believed that the knowledge we acquire is not learnt but remembered or recollected. Plato believed that the soul existed in a realm of forms before coming into the body, where it acquires this knowledge. As evidence of this he cites the slave boy who has no education but can grasp complex mathematical concepts just like the film ‘Good will hunting’, Affinity – Plato believed that the body has an affinity with the earth and that the soul has the affinity with the eternal real of forms. Because the soul is composite, at death it is dispersed at death and so it returns to the real of form to which it has an affinity and final – The final argument states that because the soul is simple and cannot be destroyed, when death, it’s opposite approaches, it must either retreat or be destroyed. As it cannot be destroyed it has to retreat, which it does in the realm of forms. Therefore, dualists would agree that the body is different from the mind.
Plato introduces a story known as the Myth of Er in