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Dualism: Do We Have The Soul?

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Do you think we humans have a soul? This is one debatable topic that still is unanswered today. The article by Richard Gunderman, “Whatever the soul is, its existence can’t be proved or disproved by natural science”, is a problematic debate under the philosophical topic of metaphysics specifically, dualism. The article is about the soul’s existence and how it cannot be proved or disproved. The Author Gunderman, really goes into depth by supporting his work when including the ancient Greek’s points of view, and explaining Duncan MacDougall’s experiments of the 20th century. The idea of the soul expresses a problem in dualism to determine if it truly exists by the evidence we can find or the stories our ancestors were able to discover. The evidence …show more content…

The professor’s first evidence he provides his readers is about Duncan MacDougall’s experiment. In this experiment, MacDougall believed that testing patients after death, he was able to conclude that individuals after death, experienced a weight loss. Which, he thought was evidence that the soul leaves the body. Then, MacDougall decided animals do not have a soul because he found no weight loss in the animals. However, his results were debunked after multiple attempts to recreate this experiment failed, and the results of weight loss in humans were nonexistent. Therefore, Gunderman states, “I look at the interior of the human body every day, but have yet to see a soul. That does not mean it doesn’t exist” (Gunderman). In addition, the professor adds that Plato and Socrates observed the soul as “a living thing”. Consequently, his next main point is that he believes the soul and the human body are separate, so the soul could pass on if the body ceases to exist …show more content…

Panyda, a neurosurgeon, published “Understanding Brain, Mind and Soul”, shows the search for the location of the soul. Panyda refers to many philosophers in his article to associate the soul within the human body. “The location of the human soul probably dates back to the awareness of such an entity. Panyda includes Christopher Pallis’s research in 1983, discussing ‘The loss of Capacity for conciseness and the capacity to breathe (after brain death) relate to functional disturbances at the opposite ends of the brain stem while the former is also a meaningful alternative to ‘the departure of the soul’. (Paynda) However, with his supporting evidence by Sir Thomas Brown, he concludes that “there is no organ or instrument for the rational soul”. Pandya really emphasizes that the soul is not separate from the brain, which contradicts Gunderman’s theories to believe that the soul and the body is a detached

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