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What is Philosophy?
The first law of philosophy
“For every philosopher, there is an equal and
opposite philosopher”
 From Plato, Phaedo (c.380
BC)
"The soul is in the very likeness of the divine, and immortal, and
intellectual, and uniform, and indissoluble, and unchangeable; and ...
the body is in the very likeness of the human, and mortal, and unintellectual,
and multiform, and changeable.”
After death, the soul "departs to the invisible world - to the divine
and immortal and rational: thither arriving, she is secure of bliss and
is released from the error and folly of men, their fears and wild passions
and all other human ills, and for ever dwells ... in company of the gods.”
 From Aristotle, De Anima
(c.325 BC)
“The soul ... cannot be separated from the body.”
“The soul is ‘what it is to be’, or the principle ... of
a certain kind of natural body having within itself a source of movement
and rest.”
“We should not ask whether the soul and body are one, any more than
whether the wax and the impression are one, or in general whether the
matter of each thing, and that of which it is the matter are one.”
 From Rene Descartes, Meditations
(1641)
“My essence consists solely in the fact that I am a thinking thing.
It is true that I may have ... a body that is very closely joined to me.
But nonetheless, on the one hand I have a clear and distinct idea of myself,
in so far as I am simply a thinking, non-extended thing; and on the other
I have a distinct idea of body, in so far as this is simply an extended,
non-thinking thing. And accordingly, it is certain that I am really distinct
from my body, and can exist without it.”
 From Benedict de
Spinoza, Ethics (1665)
“Mind and body are one and the same thing, which is
conceived now under the attribute of thought, now under that of extension.
... And consequently the order of the actions and passions of our body
is the same as the order of the actions and passions of the mind.”
 From Nicolas Malebranche,
Dialogues on Metaphysics (1688)
“Mind is not and cannot be united to ... body”
“Your body cannot act immediately on your mind. Hence although your
finger was pricked by a thorn, and although your brain was stimulated
by its action, neither finger nor brain was able to act on your soul and
make it feel pain.”
“You are unable, by yourself, to move your arm, change
your place, situation or posture, treat other people well or badly, or
produce the smallest change in the universe.”
 From David Hume, A Treatise Concerning Human Nature
(1739)
"[The mind] is nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions,
which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a
perpetual flux and movement ..."
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