Why would Aristotle n Descartes each respond differently to this claim about the relation of the body n soul?

Question

“We can dismiss as unnecessary the question whether the soul and body are one; it is as meaningless as to ask as whether the wax and the shape given to it by the stamp are one.”

Answer 1

jenab6 is conscious of consciousness perforce. Aristotle proceeds with a major contribution to western civilization where jenab6's ipse dixit stops. Now, how are we to regard Aristotle's twenty-two centuries of staying power with jenab6's ramblings, which may at maximum, if he is lucky, earn him a stick of chewing gum from his mother? Ladies and gentlemen, there can be no better example of what soul is: Aristotle's body is a fine-particle dust and yet his thought brings forth the very conditions for jenab6's nonsense!

Aristotle and Descartes would have too much trouble containing their giggle-fits upon reading this question to ever "respond differently".

Answer 2

Philosophers are people who are paid to find novel and usually long-winded ways to disagree with each other.

There is no "soul" as such. There's only consciousness, which, reflecting upon itself, notices that it does not know of itself by means of the senses. The consciousness infers the existence of a soul as a way of explaining itself to itself.

Consciousness is a reflex action that evolved because it carries survival advantages. It improved by gradual degrees across ages and species, but there were threshold levels at which new types of awareness, and an associated array of behaviors, became possible.

We humans are at one such threshold level now. We are the first of Earth's life to have the ability to look above the struggle, to recognize the historical pattern in the evolution of consciousness, and to estimate its possible future course. We can see that some possible future developments of consciousness are "higher" than others, and we can assign value to these higher degrees of future development. We can thereafter consciously strive to raise the degree of consciousness in life, and that's something that has never been done on Earth before.

With reference to vonhiggins comments below mine, I'm wondering whether there exist competing forms of super-consciousness within the human breeds. Every time I've seen the prospect raised, of guiding evolution or sorting consciousness into grades (and preferring the higher grades), up jumps someone with a sarcastic mouth who does not so much demonstrate or describe, as ridicule. It often seems to me that there is a strong "back EMF" to any current toward improving man's genes or level of consciousness.

Answer 3

Create a concept for an intangible ( a soul ), accept existence of said intangible and thus you have created a topic by which nothing can be proved. One might argue that such a discussion is an exercise in nihilism.

Answer 4

They're philosophers