معرفت فلسفی

Among the Islamic theologians (from the various tendencies of Ash’arites, Mutazelites, and People of Hadith to some Imamiya theologians), there is a view that regards human’s soul physical and corporeal. Among those theologians, some consider the soul as a tender matter, some others regard it as a main part of the body and still some others regard it as accident. There are also some others who deny the existence of the soul, and just believe in the existence of the very physical body. Similarly, in the sphere of the philosophy of mind, we see various physicalist tendencies which regard human’s soul to be the same as his brain or its function or mind. This view is called ‘identity of the mind and the brain’, ‘functionalism’ or ‘behaviorism’. In the present article, after explaining the materialistic views on the soul in Islamic theology and briefly comparing it with the physicalist views in philosophy of mind, the bases and tenets of those views are explored and the consequences and implications common among them (such as personal identity, the truth of death, purgatorial life, surprising effects of the soul, and human dignity) are extracted.