I must say that I’m quite happy thinking of the human soul as the form of the body, in the Aristotelian sense of the principle that gives it both its shape and the properties that it displays while alive. Men or women are able to act because of the union between matter (of which their bodies are made) and form (which makes them specimens of the human species, not dead lumps of meat). But in a paper written in 1979 (found in Human Life, Action and Ethics, published by the University of St Andrews) Anscombe comes at this question by way of an observation that Wittgenstein makes in his Philosophical Investigations.
Imagine you are pointing at something, because of its shape or its colour. There is nothing about the bodily action that indicates whether it’s the shape or colour that is meant. As Wittgenstein remarks, although there is, for example, no experience characteristic of pointing to a chess piece “as a piece”, all the same “one can say, ‘I mean that this piece is called the “king”, not this particular bit of wood I am pointing at’.”
What are we to make of this? “Because we can’t give any one bodily action,” he says, “which we call pointing to the shape (as opposed, for example, to the colour), we say that a spiritual activity corresponds to these words. Where our language suggests a body, and there is none, there, we should like to say, is a spirit.”
These philosophical ruminations border on the realm of ontology (the philosophy of being), which is entirely beyond the capacity of this particular [url=http://resurrectiongulfcoast.blogspot.com/]briar patch[/url] caprolagus cranium.
I have read this a number of t imes. It is pure Wittgenstein, that is, meaningless – language divorced from it s denotative base. Does anyone make real sense of this? Larry
Larry, if you think this is bad, try one of the thick tomes on Ontology. Not only am I unable to discern what his particular point is, I am also unable to determine what is the point of going through his mental-gymnastic exercise. It must take a special kind of brain to work this through, not to say even to be interested in it.