Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

joy to my soul, then again my meaning is immediately clear.

But if someone were to ask, ‘what exactly is your soul?’, well, things start to get a lot more complicated! Some will not believe in her at all. Others will maybe have a religious interpretation. But then, this will likely be somewhat vague. For instance, a question that might arise is, can there be souls without bodies? Or do we really mean spirit when we say soul? Okay then, what exactly is spirit?

The supernatural interpretations are worth some consideration, certainly, to see how this might relate to our different types of truth-seeking. In particular, of course, there’s the mysterian type of truth — often truth by means of revelation — that got only a brief mention in Chapter 2. This will be the focus of the next chapter, but I mention a few points below.

‘Soul’, in the religious context, has many different interpretations. Saint Augustine defined soul as all that is not matter. Descartes followed this on, into the dualism of mind and body, which has been touched on in earlier chapters. Soul is often seen as the link between the two — spiritual and yet connected with physical existence.

This is similar to the idea of God containing His/Her/Its creation rather than being outside or beyond it. In some traditions, including some Christian denominations, the soul is regarded as having existed for eternity or at least existing before a person's physical birth. The possible pre-existence of the soul is mostly attributed to

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