Plato and Saint Thomas Aquinas views the relation of the body and soul differently. Plato views the soul as a simple cause of life. He also believes that the body is separate from the soul. Aquinas views the soul as the first principle of life for all things that are alive, and he believes that with the soul and body combine, together that is what makes up a human person.
The dialogue, Phaedo, discusses Plato’s idea about the human soul. In Phaedo, Socrates states, “The soul, as has been acknowledged, will never receive the opposite of what it brings” (Brown 24). According to this, the soul cannot die by its self therefore it has to be immortal. Plato believed just as fire cause heat; the soul cause life. In Phaedo, Plato stated, “The human is the soul” (Brown 46). The soul is the person according to
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The body fears death because it will eventually die. Plato concludes that a past life must have existed and the soul must have existed outside of the body. He believes soul exists after death but the body gets left behind.
Plato’s view of the relations of body and soul is important because he proposed the idea that to be living meant that you also had a soul. The consequences of his idea were that humans were their own souls and that all things are only souls. Plato explained, “soul is present in plants and animals as well as humans” (Brown 46). The information pertains to all souls which are all immortal.
Aquinas had a similar definition of the soul in comparison to Plato’s definition of the soul. From a piece of his writing, Simma Theologiae Part 1, Aquinas wrote “that the soul is defined as the first principle of life in those things in which live: for we call living things animate [besouled], and those things which have no life, inanimate [soulless] (Brown 125). Aquinas recognizes the soul as the basic cause of all things that are alive, which are things that move and that have knowledge. (Brown