Soul (spirituality)

The soul is an immaterial essence of a person, often understood as the source of identity, consciousness, or moral agency and sometimes believed to survive bodily death.

Personal identity: The conditions that make someone the same person across time and change. The soul is often proposed as what preserves a person’s identity through bodily and psychological change.
Physicalism: The view that everything is physical or depends entirely on the physical. Physicalism rejects an immaterial soul as an independent component of a person.
Mind–body problem: The philosophical problem of how mental phenomena relate to physical bodies and processes. Soul theories offer one answer to how thought and bodily life are connected.
Plato: An ancient Greek philosopher whose writings shaped Western metaphysics and ethics. Plato argued that the soul is distinct from the body and can survive its death.
Funeral rites: Ceremonies and practices for honoring and disposing of the dead. Beliefs about the soul’s departure or continued existence influence how communities treat the dead.
Afterlife: Existence or experience believed to continue after bodily death. Belief in a surviving soul is a common explanation for how personal existence could continue after death.
Mind–body dualism: The view that mind and body are fundamentally distinct kinds of substance or property. Many soul theories treat the soul as the mental or spiritual side distinct from the body.
Consciousness: The state or capacity of having subjective experience. The soul is often identified with, or treated as the bearer of, conscious experience.
Aristotle: An ancient Greek philosopher whose works shaped logic, biology, and metaphysics. Aristotle described the soul as the form and organizing principle of a living body.
Abortion: The ending of a pregnancy before birth. Disagreements about when a soul begins can shape religious and ethical arguments about abortion.

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