After reading Plato's Phaedo, we can see that there are many differences between the body and soul. Plato outlines these in some of the arguments given by Socrates. The first time the differences are brought to our attention, is when Plato talks about how a true philosopher would welcome death instead of being afraid of it. His reasoning for this is that a true philosopher who 'applies himself in the right way' will not be concerned with worldly, material matters and would rather use his soul to understand and reflect. He tries to disconnect himself from his body in order to be free from bodily distractions. There can be no certainty with bodily sensations; they cannot be trusted to be reliable. The truest perception of the real nature of any given thing can only be discerned by the soul and its own investigations rather than by any bodily perception. Therefore in this way the body is distinct from the soul. It is only with the explorations of the soul itself that man can discover the true nature of a given thing. If he were to use bodily

Descartes opens his Second Meditation by describing the extent of his doubt; he now doubts virtually every item of knowledge that he had previously believed. He believes that if he finds one indubitable truth, he will have found some sort of foundation for his beliefs. The truth that he finds is his existence: 'I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind'. Even an evil genius cannot deceive him in this matter. Once he has found his indubitable truth, he then attempts to further his knowledge by discovering what type of thing he is. He calls himself a 'rational animal' but finds this unsatisfactory, as it would involve investigating the notion of rationality and animalism, so he recalls a more general view that he had, that he is composed of a body and soul. He cannot refer to himself as a thing with a body as this involves sensory perception. He must then investigate the qualities of the soul, which have he previously thought were nutrition and movement but again this would involve the body, which he doubts. Descartes concluded that the only attribute that he can claim at the moment is thinking. He says a thinking thing is 'a thing which doubts, understands, affirms, denies, is willing, is unwilling and also imagines and has sensory perception.

This I believe to be a correct observation, as the body only serves to confuse the soul's interpretation of an event or object. The signals received from the body's sensory organs such as the eyes or the ears can be misunderstood by the soul, bringing about a false understanding of the event or object. When these sensations and perceptions are not relied upon and rather ignored, the soul is able to reflect upon the circumstance of the event or the nature of the object objectively, without any chance of being influenced by the biases that the body brings. It would be very difficult to attain such a state of independence in order to unearth the truth though.

He then goes on to reflect upon the mental realm and the material realm. It seems that the material realm, which can be perceived via bodily experience, is easier to understand whereas the mental realm is harder to understand. But to Descartes the mental realm is clearer than the material realm and this he proves by giving the example of wax. Descartes argues that our senses alone cannot inform us of the continuity of the two states of the wax since none of the qualities remains the same. The continuity of wax cannot be established through the faculty of the imagination either, since we could imagine an infinite variety of changes the wax could go through. Descartes concludes that the continuity of the wax is established neither by sight, nor touch, nor imagination, but by an act of the mind alone. He then considers possible criticisms to his conclusion that we understand t

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Approximate Word count = 1912
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)