When Plato has Socrates argue in the Phaedo that we have knowledge we could not have acquired in this life and therefore our souls must have existed before they took on this bodily form, he argues for soul-body dualism from an impersonal point of view. Such is also true of his other arguments for soul-body dualism. Augustine, by contrast, argues for mind-body dualism in Book 10 of On the Trinity from a first-person point of view. He argues there that the mind (mens) is fully present to itself and so knows and is certain of its own substance or nature. However, he goes on, the mind does not know nor is it certain that it is air or fire or any other body that philosophers have theorized it to be; therefore, it is none of these things, that is nothing bodily (10.10.16).
Like Descartes, long after him, Augustine argues that the mind is something that remembers, understands, wills, thinks, knows, and judges (10.10.14). Augustine adds that the mind also lives, and in this he differs from Descartes, who supposes life to be a purely material phenomenon. But the difference between these two thinkers on whether life is a psychological function is not as great as it might seem to be. In truth, Augustine does not understand living to be, necessarily, anything physiological. One can ask whether there is life after death without asking about post mortem physiology.
Anticipating the critics of Cartesian dualism, Augustine himself poses for himself the philosophical problem of other minds, that is, the problem of how each of us can know that other living creatures have minds. Augustine’s answer is a form of the Argument from Analogy. ‘‘Just as we move our body in living,’’ he writes, ‘‘so, we notice, those bodies are moved’’ and so we come to think that there is present in another body ‘‘such as is present in us to move our mass in a similar way’’ (On the Trinity, 8.6.9).
World History
