An A–Zwhich infuses and animates a body. In the Jewish schema, life
after death was just not that interesting, which is why immor-
tality is not discussed in the Hebrew Bible.
It is only with the birth of ancient Greek philosophy that the
search for the soul becomes integral to the Western tradition.
Plato explored the thesis that the soul is the immaterial part
of a human. It could be thought of as being united with the
body, perhaps temporarily. To use more philosophical terms, he
argued that the soul may be the form of the human individual.
When that form enters into the matter of which the body is
made, that matter becomes animated. That same soul will also
leave the body too, which provides a defi nition of death: the
matter of the body becomes formless once again and so dis-
solves. Incidentally, Plato also talks of philosophy as aiming at
the perfection of the soul, achieved particularly through knowl-
edge of oneself.
For Aristotle, the soul is the form of the body too, the means
by which the body is animated. However, for Aristotle, and
contra Plato, the form doesn’t enter matter, it already is embod-
ied matter. It has no separate existence. Neither, then, does
the soul. This conviction follows from Aristotle’s defi nition of
human beings as being social animals: sociability requires bodies
since bodies are the means by which we perceive and commu-
nicate. Another corollary of this is that only embodied beings
have souls. For example, God does not have a soul according
to Aristotle, since God does not have a body. Further, Aristotle
believed that plants and animals can have souls too, if of a dif-
ferent kind: it is probably only humans who have an ‘intellec-
tual soul’, witnessed to by their capacity to think abstractly and
decide freely.
A third tradition about the soul among the ancient Greeks
comes from the atomists. They were materialists, believing that
the world was constituted solely of matter in the form of indi-
visible atoms. So, they had to address the problem of how some
matter could be animated, as it is in living organisms. They pro-
posed that there were such things as ‘soul atoms’ that existed