What is the meaning of Soul? Concept, Definition of Soul

Definition of soul

1 Meaning of soul

The concept of soul comes from the latin "anima" which means air and refers to a spiritual principle that informs the human body and with it constitutes the human essence. It consists of the moral and emotional part of man. Many primitive peoples understand everything that moves as inhabited by a soul, as essence of man, generally conceived as something that exists before birth and following with life after death.
Ancient Greek philosophy had two interpretations concerning this topic. The first believes that the body and soul are separate and heterogeneous entities in deep conflict. The Pythagorean philosophers heirs of orphism argued this theory. Its best known representative is Plato who postulated that the soul is a being above, heavenly and immortal body whose proper place, although it dropped when the ground, is the world of Ideas. The body for it would be "the tomb of the soul", i.e. a structure earthly and oppressive where keeps it closed and incommunicado with their true origin.
The second interpretation comes from the Aristotelian concept that defines the soul as the body shape, that is, what gives life and makes it function as a body. For Aristotle, the soul and the body are concepts that cannot be explained separately. Both theories are related to the Christian religion and then reformulated during the Renaissance by neoplatonic and neoaristotelicos authors who will question basically the concepts of immateriality and immortality of the soul.
In the 17TH century begins a new philosophical stage with the appearance of René Descartes, who run what we call 'body' and what we call "soul" to refer to two finite substances defined by radically heterogeneous attributes: on the one hand the extension, on the other hand thought. The soul for it is headquartered in a small gland that is in the center of the brain (pineal gland) and is suspended between its cavities that can be moved by men. This theory received many taunts and other thinkers began to give new answers.
In the 19th century the classical argument posited changes focus: the problem of the immortality of the soul leaves the scene and is almost definitely limited to faith. The body begins to be seen as something more than an organic support. Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Freud made unviable Cartesian between soul and consciousness identity to show that our thoughts involves motives, impulses and forces that we don't know completely.

2. Definition of soul

The concept of soul, but through the years it was evolving and acquiring new formulations which do not propose it or used it as if was done in antiquity to fiercely oppose the concept of body and thus can stigmatize more and more to the latter, has always linked it or has used it to describe the insidespiritual that holds every human being, there where are the instincts, feelings and emotions of the men and that has nothing to do with the body that you can see and touch. This situation is that the soul, soul or psyche, as also it is known, involves an intangible and invisible, which is housed in the interior of the body and principle that attends all those issues requiring a commitment on the part of the person's deepest. Many philosophers of different cultures and creeds distinguished turn the soul of the spirit, pointing first to the most important aspects and secondly to the understanding. Thus, according to this view, human beings would be individuals with 3 facets or components (body, soul, spirit or understanding), while animals only have body and spirit and plant beings with body structure.
Also as a result of this immaterial which is "doomed", soul is impossible that its existence is verified through any research or scientific evidence target type or for the rational methodology of knowledge.
Meanwhile, returning to the theme of stigma that was given to the concept of body, it found it in what was the dual concept that, in this regard, proposed the philosopher Plato in his legacy, which was then picked up by some philosophers associated with sectors of Christianity (in the beginning) and Islam (in a second term), he argued that the body was something like "prison of the soul" to which this had come as a result the Commission of a crime and therefore no longer could see eternal essences, but such only remember them (allegory of the cave). On the other hand, platonic philosophy proposed a constant confrontation of the soul with the body, which always reduced to evil and condemning the contempt. These concepts of Socratic nature persist even in some modern philosophies.
Likewise and more that nothing nowadays, the term is widely used by religion, by religious, for example, priests, people who talk about the need to purify certain souls of some men who have been contaminated by Sin on a recurring basis.
With this sense that gives the religion in these times, the soul ends up being something like the consciousness of people, for certain circumstances, actions or poorly aimed thoughts is stained or damaged, taking the religion work of healing through faith, commitment and prayer. It is interesting to note that, despite the inviolability and the inability to demonstrate its existence from the point of view of rational experience, all the cultures of the planet in its different historical moments recognize the soul as a real component of the human being and conceive its separation from the body from the moment of death, or esoteric nature experiences, as the so-called astral travel. Even some ancient and modern religions propose the abandonment of the body from the soul to the death, with subsequent return to a new body, not necessarily human, as they profess to believe in reincarnation. On the other hand, is supported in the monotheistic religions, the output of the soul at the moment of death leads her to a space for everlasting joy (heaven or Paradise), the definitive condemnation (hell) or a State of further debugging (the purgatory of Catholic doctrine). Adds that some of these faiths, such as Catholicism, Anglicanism, and Judaism, conceived in addition the reunification of the soul and the body toward the end of time, generally called the resurrection of the dead.

3 Concept of soul

It is so dear / as, soul is the term that brings us together this time. As well, before moving on to define it, we stop at its etymological origin. The feminine noun in question derives from the latin anima, whose meaning is exactly the same. It's not easy to give a specific definition on the term that gives life to this article, since the philosophical and cultural influence much on it. But, in spite of this, we could say that you it's the intangible part of the human being who is able to feel and think. To turn, in conjunction with the body or the so-called part material, come to constitute the human essence. Also, according to what they argue some religions, it has the particularity of being immortal.
Moreover, from the perspective of the Judeo-Christian religious tradition, the soul would be nothing more and nothing less than the main quality capable of identifying the movement in living matter, making it a shifting or not shifting, independent alien translocation. Meanwhile, if the etymology of the term in question is reviewed you will see that it stated the principle by which as many animals as humans could move on their own. Linked to this, the footballer Pope John Paul II were encouraged to say that animals also have souls.
On the other hand, from the field of philosophy, one of the leading thinkers who focused his studies on the soul was Plato. The legacy of this philosopher, although it seems weird and strange, then was taken by the Church itself. According to Plato, the body would be as a prison of the soul. It stayed there as a result of having committed some sort of crime and that therefore it was not possible to see the eternal essences.
As we said at the beginning, for some regions the soul is immortal. Among them just Catholicism is. According to this belief, after death, the individual above God thanks to their soul, which has no source material.
Synonym of soul
Let us now see what synonyms are there in this word: essence, spectrum, spirit, breath, soul, substance, inside, consciousness, will, psyche, heart.