A Philosophical Quandary: An Invitation To Philosophy By Matthew Laurents

A Philosophical Quandary In, An Invitation to Philosophy, Matthew Laurents proposes a philosophical quandary through the story of a man, Matthew, and his two sisters, Melissa and Melinda. In this story, Matthew is in a terrible motorcycle accident that leaves him in a vegetative state (Laurents, An Invitation to Philosophy 10). At the hospital, Matthew is found to have a “living will” in his possession that states “…in the event he becomes incapacitated, he wishes his two sisters, Melissa and Melinda, to determine jointly what course of treatment should be administered (Laurents, An Invitation to Philosophy 12). He specifically states that they must agree—"after due deliberation of all available information, of course." (Laurents, An Invitation

In a broad sense, Plato would agree with Melinda for the most part. To ask the question of whether or not Matthew has a soul and what exactly it means to be alive, we must dive deeper into Plato’s ideas about human existence and what exactly makes us who we are. If Melinda were to side with how Plato thinks, she would employ some of his ideas about how the soul is related to the body in her discussion with her sister. Melinda would probably reference the idea that the soul is the true form of a human, that it is the “true” person (Laurents, Plato's Phaedo 10). This argument pertains directly to what Melinda believes in; she believes that it would be murder to unplug Matthew because you would be severing the soul’s connection to the body, destroying the “real” Matthew. Diving deeper into what arguments of Plato that Melinda might use, there are two predominate cases that Plato makes when it comes to the defense of the soul’s existence; the argument of recollection and the argument of opposites (Laurents, Plato's Phaedo 16,23). The first argument available to Melinda is that of the argument of recollection (Laurents, Plato's Phaedo 16). The argument of recollection is rooted in the idea that our souls exist before our bodies do, and that is why we have certain knowledge immediately when we are

Aristotle would agree with Melissa to an extent but would not agree that there is not a soul. Aristotle’s views on the soul stem almost entirely from his basic orientation, or his worldview. Aristotle, in short, believed that the human being does indeed have a soul but it was very much inseparable from the body (Laurents, Aristotle 28). This causes Aristotle to believe that there is no personal life after death (Laurents, Aristotle 29). Aristotle’s views on this subject are rooted in his beliefs that this world is all there is; that observation is king (Laurents, Aristotle 5). This belief is also heavily influenced by his belief that our language is powerful and is what gives us the clearest idea about reality and what our place in it is (Laurents, Aristotle 4). Matthew Laurents puts Aristotle’s view this way, “Aristotle believed that, of all the ways we interact with the world, by far what we do most is talk about things. So, he seems to have thought that language provided our basic clues about the nature of