Posted: May 11th, 2015

Write – in the style of Descartes – your own ‘Seventh Meditation,’ in which the immortality of the soul is proven (in accordance with the programmatic sketch above).

Write – in the style of Descartes – your own ‘Seventh Meditation,’ in which the immortality of the soul is proven (in accordance with the programmatic sketch above).

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Assignment: Descartes never does prove the immortality of the soul within his Meditations. Concerning this issue, he writes within the ‘Synopsis’ that:

“From [the Sixth Meditation] we are prompted to acknowledge that the natures of mind and body not only are different from one another, but even, in a manner of speaking, are contraries to one another. However, I have not written any further on the matter in this work, both because these considerations suffice for showing that the annihilation of the mind does not follow from the decaying of the body (and thus these considerations suffice for giving mortals hope in any afterlife), and also because the premises from which the immortality of the mind can be inferred depend upon an account of the whole of physics. First, we need to know that absolutely all substances, that is, things that must be created by God in order to exist, are by their very nature incorruptible, and can never cease to exist, unless, by the same God’s denying concurrence to them, they be reduced to nothingness. Second, we need to realize that body, taken in general sense, is a substance and hence it too can never perish. But the human body, insofar as it differs from other bodies, is composed of merely a certain configuration of members, together with accidents of the same sort. But the human mind is not likewise composed of any accidents, but is a pure substance. For even if all its accidents were changed, so that it understands different things, wills different things, senses different things, and so on, the mind itself does not on that score become something different, merely as a result of the fact that a change in the shape of some of its parts has taken place. It follows from these considerations that a body can very easily perish, whereas the mind by its nature is immortal.”