¹ Odyssey 24. 5–10.

² Phaedrus 245 c, 249 a-b.

³ Denzinger-Schönmetzer 800.

⁴ The notion of a body employed by the Council is the physicist's, not the problematic notion used by philosophers. For a physicist, a body is anything with mass and (though today this is thought unimportant) the power to affect sense-organs. For coroners and undertakers, a body is a corpse. In ordinary speech by ‘my body’ we often mean my torso, or the whole of me except my head, hands and feet. But for a philosopher, ‘my body’ means none of these things, and what it does mean is a problem on its own.

⁵ The phrase translates Aristotle's dianoetike psuche, De Anima 3 431a14. Aristotle speaks of a self-nourishing soul and a perceiving soul as well as a thinking soul; Aquinas and other Christian Aristotelians say that only the thinking soul is immortal and capable of existing apart from the body.

⁶ Denzinger-Schönmetzer 1440 Here the notion of body used is that of the philosopher.

⁷ On the Soul 1. 17. Vincentius Victor held that animas a deo, non ex propagine fieri, sed novas singulis insufflari, Migne PL 44.484.

⁸ In Phaedrus 245 c – e and Sophist 249 a-b Plato uses a different approach and takes soul to be the source of life and movement, but reaches the same conclusion about its nature.

⁹ City of God 22.27.

¹⁰ Denzinger-Schönmetzer 902.

¹¹ Summa Theologiae 1a q. 75 a. 2; q. 75 a.1

¹² City of God 19.3, a passage referred to by Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1a q. 75 a. 4; see also City 22.27–8.

¹³ As Aristotle says at Metaphysics H 1043b6, a house does not consist of bricks and arrangement.

¹⁴ Aristotle labours this at Metaphysics Z 1033a24-b11.

¹⁵ Identity and Spatio-Temporal Continuity, Oxford, Blackwell, 1967, pp 46–9Google Scholar. Other interpretations have been put forward; Richard King, for example, argues that Aristotle identifies the soul with life, and especially with the activity of self-nourishment (Aristotle on Life and Death, London, Duckworth, 2001 Ch. 1), and this interpretation apparently satisfies the theologian Nicholas Lash, but I think most scholars would say that the choice lies between taking an Aristotelian form as an attribute and taking it as a thing constituted.

¹⁶ ‘Aristotle's Definition of Soul’, Phronesis, 25 (1980) 170–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ‘Aristotle and the Harmonia Theory’, in Aristotle on Nature and Living Things, ed. Gotthelf, A., Bristol Classical Press 1986, 131–50Google Scholar; ‘Aristotelian Powers’, Phronesis 32, 277–98, 1987CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ‘Aristotle and the Place of Mind in Nature’, Philosophical Issues in Aristotle's Biology, ed. Gotthelf, A. and Lennox, J., Cambridge University Press 1987. 408–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁷ See Josephus, Antiquities, 18.2. 2 Mc 7 14 says there is no after life for the wicked; the Pharisees, according to Josephus, thought there was; Wisdom and first century Christians are sure of an after life for the good, but seem uncertain about the ultimate fate of the wicked.

¹⁸ Phaedo 82 e – 83 a.

¹⁹ Sonnet 146.

²⁰ First Book of Ayres.

²¹ On Mill see note 31 below.

²² Animula, vagula, blandula, hospes comesque corporis, quae nunc abibis in loca?

²³ These rarefied constituents account for our ability to think, since the basic forms of thought are thinking to be, thinking to be the same, and thinking to be other.

²⁴ For Milton and seventeenth century pneumatology in general see C. S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost, London, Oxford University Press, 1942, Ch. 15. Locke s speculations about spirits and angels in Essay 2.23.13 suggest respect for this current wisdom, and his elusive ‘spiritual substance’ (Essay 2.23.5) which he thinks irrelevant to personal identity (Essay 2.27.12–13) seems to be less a spiritual agent than the supposed spiritual material of such an agent.

²⁵ Phaedrus 248–9.

²⁶ It was condemned at Braga, Denzinger-Schönmetzer 456.

²⁷ The Hellenistic Philosophers, edd. Long, A. A. and Sedley, D.N., Cambridge University Press 1987Google Scholar, 45 C-D.

²⁸ See Descartes, , Philosophical Writings edd. Geach, Peter and Anscombe, G. E. M., London, Nelson, 1954, pp. 277–8Google Scholar.

²⁹ ‘In action, how like an angel! In apprehension, how like a god!’ But Hamlet is in fact speaking of a human being, not a soul.

³⁰ A System of Logic 1.3.5.

³¹ Mill prefers to use the word ‘mind’, which, he says, is not difficult to define: ‘mind is the mysterious something which feels and thinks.’ But he adds (echoing Locke, Essay 2.23.5) ‘On the inmost nature of the thinking principle, as well as on the inmost nature of matter, we are, and with our faculties must always remain, entirely in the dark.’A System of Logic 1.3.8. We must try to do better than that.

³² ‘It is just by means of ordinary life and conversation, by abstaining from meditating … that one learns to conceive of the union of soul and body.’ Op. cit. p. 280.

³³ Richard Sorabji: Self: Ancient and Modern Insights about Individuality, Life and Death, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2006, Ch. 3.

³⁴ We speak of organic parts like kidneys rather as we speak of complete organisms. If you give me a kidney transplant, we should say that the same kidney was once yours and is now mine. Suppose then that Helena, whom we know to have been a brilliant physician, swapped all her organs with Diana. Should we say that the same body was once Diana's and is now Helena's? The notion of a person's body is not analogous to that of an organ. An organ is a part with the capacity to perform a certain function; a body may be an aggregate of parts, but an aggregate of parts capable of performing functions is not a person's body but a complete living organism. If Helena swaps all her organs with Diana, what is now her body is an aggregate of different parts, but it is no more a different aggregate than if she has simply experienced the replacement of particles which naturally attends aging and pregnancy. Her body is the same body because she is the same functioning aggregate.

³⁵ See especially Summa contra Gentiles 2.49; Summa Theologiae 1a q. 75 a. 2.

³⁶ De Sensu 436a4–10, b6–8.

³⁷ Not sentience, but we say that the retina is sensitive to light, and the middle and inner ears sensitive to sound waves.

³⁸ That there is no such moment is argued by Plato in Theaetetus 207 d – 208 b, and by Wittgenstein, Blue and Brown Books p. 120; Philosophical Investigations 1.157.

³⁹ Deus qui humanae substantiae dignitatem mirabiliter condidisti et mirabilius reformasti, da nobis per huius aquae et vini mysterium eius divinitatis esse consortes qui humanitatis nostrae fieri dignatus est particeps. It is regrettable that this prayer is much shortened in English translations, and often said only sotto voce.