What Is A Person? (Part II)
By Dennis McInerny
For the Platonist, the human person is the soul. The body is but a temporary incumbrance, and a most bothersome one at that, from which we will be freed permanently on the day we die. On that happy occasion, released from bondage to the material, we will become again what we originally were—purely spiritual creatures.
For the materialist, on the other hand, the human person is the body. The soul is only a fiction invented by certain benighted types who can’t face the fact that reality is simply matter and nothing but than matter. All of our human experiences, including things like consciousness and thought, can be explained entirely in terms of matter. And when the body dies, says the materialists, that is the …
