The National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly

Volume 18, Issue 3, Autumn 2018

Discussing the Spiritual Soul in the Classroom

There is a pedagogical method of bringing undergraduate students to conceive the body–soul question. Similarly, there is a simple philosophical argument in defense of the existence of the soul via contemporary autobiographical stories, recent neuroscientific literature, and Socrates’s distinction between condition and cause in Plato’s Phaedo. This method has proved helpful in enabling students to gain access to the mystery and grandeur of the body–soul question and its foundational importance with respect to ethics and, indeed, to the meaning of life. There must be a revival of collaboration between neuroscientists and philosophers to coauthor papers that explicitly challenge the materialist assumptions in the fields of neuroscience and psychology.