Arrested Development and Philosophy_ They've Made a Huge Mistake - Kristopher G. Phillips [61]
Aristotle’s work in philosophy and science was hugely influential for a long time after his death (in 322 BCE). Many medieval theologians and philosophers, such as Augustine of Hippo3 (354–430) and Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), constructed philosophical systems at least in part based on Aristotle’s principles. During this period, there was an “exapting” of the idea of the essence from Aristotelian doctrine, to the Christian doctrine of the immaterial soul (the bearer of mind and personality, and the part of humans that survives the death of the material body).
This approach was picked up by the first modern philosopher, René Descartes (1596–1650), who was a devout (and some argue, terrible) Catholic. Descartes made substance dualism one of the cornerstones of his philosophical system. Substance dualism is the view that there are two distinct kinds of stuff that exist, matter or body and mind or spirit, and neither one requires the other to exist. According to Descartes, each of us has our own immaterial soul, and that soul is the bearer of our individual mind; it makes us who we are. In a way, the soul is the essence of a person. In light of other traditional theological considerations, the “essence as soul” approach becomes a bit less mysterious, and a bit more robust. This gives us a more straightforward answer to the metaphysical question: What makes George Sr. different from Oscar? Oscar has a unique soul, and thus we can explain the fundamentally different feel that Oscar’s character has from his brother throughout the show. George and Oscar have different immaterial souls, despite having such similar bodies.
Aristotle thought that a person consisted of a specific combination of essence (he called it “form”) and matter. Ann is bland and is bound to her bell-shaped-body, Marta is a fox, and is bound to the material that makes up her body. The Cartesian (Descartes’s) view,4 on the other hand, isn’t committed to this at all. There’s nothing specific to your body that’s essential to you on his view. To be sure, Oscar and George have different bodies, Oscar has hair (oh, that hair . . .) while George doesn’t. They can stand next to each other, and that would only be possible if they had numerically distinct bodies. To be sure, there’s a fair amount of switching places because their bodies look so much alike. On Descartes’s view, if George had the power, he could switch souls with Oscar, and that would probably solve many of his problems. By doing this, he wouldn’t have to rely on the Cornballer’s shoddy craftsmanship to burn off Oscar’s fingerprints, or his adopted Korean child, Annyong (hello!), playing Uncle Sam in a school play so that he can “take wig”; he could really switch bodies.
This raises an interesting question about the interaction of the soul with the body: if George and Oscar did switch souls, would the George body, now inhabited by Oscar’s soul, start growing hair? Just how the soul interacts, and is joined with the body is an issue central to the philosophy of mind, and most philosophers after Descartes find his explanation wanting. But that’s an issue for another day. Descartes, of course, doesn’t think that any of us have the power to swap souls with one another (and isn’t really concerned with George Sr.’s lack of hair) and, if he’s right, that’s a good thing for Oscar. It’s hard enough for him to stay out of prison as it is.
Aside from the obvious explanatory value of the Cartesian picture for the metaphysical question (which seems to speak in favor of the Cartesian picture), Descartes’s use of the immaterial soul provides an answer to the persistence problem. Descartes maintained, in accord with the Judeo-Christian tradition, that the soul can and does survive the death of the body. This offers an easy answer to the persistence problem: If the soul is what makes George different from Oscar, and George’s soul will survive the actual death of his body, as opposed to the less-than-perfect deception