Lucretius' Writing on the Fear of Death Essay

René Descartes believed that the mind and body are separate; that the senses could not always be trusted, but that because we as humans are able to think about our existence, we possess some sort of entity separate than our fleshly body. I believe this separate entity to be a soul”an immaterial and

What is the mind-body problem? The mind-body problem asks the question, are the mind and body separate substances of elements of the same substance? In this paper I wish to propose, and try to provide support for Descartes notion of the immaterial mind, by critically discussing the view of substance dualism, pertaining to the relationship between the mind and body. The two arguments of which I will provide in this paper to support this view are divisibility and disembodied existence. There are two fundamentally different substances in this universe, physical and mental properties, this paper will explore both of these substances (8).

Summary: The problem of the soul continues as Descartes suggested that the human is composed of two completely different substances; a physical body which Descartes compares with a machine, and a non-physical mind, related to the soul, that allows humans to think and feel even if it has no “measurable dimensions” (67). But Elizabeth put in doubt his ideologies when she realized that a non-physical thing doesn’t have the strength to push and move the body. This led to several questions unanswered and also let space for other materialist theories such as behaviorism, mind-brain identity, and functionalism, which also fail in offering an explicit solution.

Two years after Descartes published his meditations on first philosophy, Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia wrote with questions concerning the relationship between the immaterial soul and the corporeal body- specifically how anything immaterial could produce physical effects. She was neither the first nor the last to question this practical application of Descartes’ dualism, but her questions elicited the most comprehensive attempt to answer the question. In this paper I will examine Descartes’ arguments for the existence of body as distinct from the mind; outline Elisabeth’s objections and proposed solutions, and argue that Descartes’ responses to Elisabeth are inadequate to address the problem of mind-body interaction without

Descartes' formulation of what he calls the “Real Distinction” has proved foundational to our modern concepts of being and consciousness. His contention has irreversibly influenced the fields of psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and others while cementing into the popular consciousness the notion of a definite dichotomy between the mind and the body. In this paper, I will flesh out what Descartes' meant by the term “real distinction,” discuss the arguments he uses in its' defense, and then argue myself that this distinction between mind and body (at least as Descartes frames it) goes much too far, and that it is a much more viable probability to believe that mind and body are actually intertwined, one and the same.

Have you ever thought about what happens after you die; if there is something after this life? There are many different approaches to whether there is life after death or not, but in this paper we will be looking at the Christian perspective towards the afterlife. Christianity is the largest religion in the world today due to it being branched down into different groups, and it is a known fact that there is no other religion today that has a huge impact on our world to the extent that Christianity does. Christianity's beliefs on the afterlife can be broke down into two main broad groups, those of the Roman Catholic Church, and those of the Protestant Church. Most often, Christian

In the world of philosophy, there has been an ever growing skepticism of the relationship between the human body and its mental state. The physical state of a person is tangible, meaning that they can be seen by anyone and touched. While the mental state of a person is embedded in their consciencousness, meaning that it can’t be observed by others unless willing expressed by said person. I will be using Leibniz’s law of identity to show that the metal states of an individual are distinct from a physical state. Using the notion of sameness, I can prove a valid argument that the physical and mental states are distinct. While this theory in part can be debated, some identity theorists can provide a rebuttal this claim. I will provide a response to an identity theorist rebuttal.

Why are people afraid of death? It is believed that “Many people’s fears are religious based. Whether we go to church or not, Heaven or Hell is a subject that is in our culture” (Dischaub). 68% of Americans have a fear of death (NIMH). “A more specific intent was to develop a way to test terror management theory, or TMT. The theory is a formal elaboration of ideas that had been floating around since at least the time of the ancient historian Thucydides and that were first introduced in psychology by Otto Rank. Basically, the idea goes: the fear of death drives people to maintain faith in their own culture's beliefs and to follow the culture's paths to an enduring significance that will outlast their own physical death, often to the detriment

One claim is that material things, including the human body, are totally subject to physical laws. Another claim is that the immaterial mind is capable of moving a human body. It can be argued that the two claims are compatible. In this world, there is material substance in which extension is its essential attribute. There is also the mind in which thought is its essential attribute. Since a substance doesn’t require anything apart from itself to exist, then matter and mind are compatible independent of one another. All in all, the material body and the mind usually interact in a living person. The body’s motion is sometimes affected by the mind, and the mind’s thoughts influenced by physical

In his only extant work, the poem De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), Epicurean author Titus Lucretius Carus writes of the soul as being inseparable from the corporeal body. This view, although controversial in its opposition to the traditional concept of a discrete, immortal soul, is nevertheless more than a mere novelty. The argument that Lucretius makes for the soul being an emergent property of interactions between physical particles is in fact more compelling and well-supported now than Lucretius himself would have ever imagined.

For my research review, I selected Puppy-Monkey-Baby (PMB) Terror Management Analysis of Psychological Functions of Religion. This research article focuses on terror management theory, and more specifically how religion serves to manage the terror a human may experience when confronted with the thought of death (Vail, 2010). Although non-religious beliefs can serve as a form of terror management, spiritual beliefs are frequently used to alleviate anxiety caused by death because they are not easily negated and assure immortality (Vail, 2010). Scientists in this study analyze research, which supports that mortality produces an increased belief in the afterlife, supernatural agency, human ascension from nature, and spiritual distinctions between mind and body (Vail, 2010). The study also analyzes the social benefits of religion and how each religion will vary in regards to terror management theory. Overall, this study is very detailed and makes several interesting points concerning the correlation between religion and terror management theory.

soul and a material brain under the currently accepted laws of physics and more specifically of the law

The Mind-Body problem arises to Philosophy when we wonder what is the relationship between the mental states, like beliefs and thoughts, and the physical states, like water, human bodies and tables. For the purpose of this paper I will consider physical states as human bodies because we are thinking beings, while the other material things have no mental processes. The question whether mind and body are the same thing, somehow related, or two distinct things not related, has been asked throughout the history of Philosophy, so some philosophers tried to elaborate arrangements and arguments about it, in order to solve the problem and give a satisfactory answer to the question. This paper will argue that the Mind-Body Dualism, a view in

It is also important to say that he also believes the soul is the form of the body in part, because the soul is the organization of the parts the body, the body is matter and it or soul is the form-the actual living body. To reiterate this point Aristotle offers us the example of a corpse and a bronze or wooden hand and states that these are not forms as they “lack the potentiality to perform the function of a hand”.7this would also suggest that once we are dead we undergo a material change which stops function and makes us akin to a statue. Aristotle then goes on to discuss matter which he says is “the matter that is the subject necessarily has a certain sort of nature....fire has a hot and light nature”8. He states that matter is what earlier philosophers focused on and it was how they explained the order of the world. Aristotle however does not believe that this is the way in which we should study nature, he believes we should ask what gives each natural substance its characteristic and we should look at “how each thing has naturally come to be, rather than how it is...then state their causes”9. Therefore he concludes that a prior observational investigation is best and that we should study the form.

From the the very beginning of human civilization, there has been a constant that will always be present, no matter what happens with anything going on in the world. This constant is death, as death has been a part of humanity forever, and will always continue to be, no matter what may be occurring in the world at that moment. A second constant in the human realm of consciousness is very closely linked to death-in fact, it could be argued that the presence of death led to the creation of this constant. The second constant is the existence of religion, or systems of belief, in all of their incredibly varying shapes and forms. Many different forms of religions and belief systems exist, and across the board it can be found that they all share numerous qualities, which shall be elaborated in detail later on. North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was home to the religion of Puritanism. Many writers of the period were Puritan and produced large quantities of religious poetry. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Puritan poetry was primarily written with the purpose of converting people to Puritanism, and used death as the primary device in motivating people to convert.