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c. 800–700 BCE · IndianYājñavalkya
The Self is the pure witness, not the body or the mind’s contents; it is the “unseen seer”.
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c. 563–483 BCE · IndianGautama Buddha
Neither body nor mind is a self; both are aggregates in flux, arising together.
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c. 428–348 BCE · Ancient GreekPlato
The soul is immortal and akin to the Forms; the body is its prison — philosophy is practice for their separation.
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384–322 BCE · Ancient GreekAristotle
The soul is the form of the living body, as the shape is the form of wax; asking whether they are one is like asking whether the wax and its shape are one.
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980 – 1037 · Islamic & ArabicAvicenna (Ibn Sīnā)
The Flying Man, suspended in air with no sensation, would still know he exists — so the self is not the body.
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1225 – 1274 · Patristic & MedievalThomas Aquinas
The human soul is the form of the body yet subsists on its own, since thinking needs no bodily organ.
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1596 – 1650 · FrenchRené Descartes
Mind is thinking, unextended substance; body is extended, unthinking — two substances interacting at the pineal gland.
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1632 – 1677 · DutchBaruch Spinoza
Mind and body are one thing seen under two attributes — thought and extension.
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1646 – 1716 · German-languageGottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Mind and body do not interact at all; God synchronized them like two perfect clocks.
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1711 – 1776 · British & IrishDavid Hume
There is no mental substance to relate to the body — only a bundle of perceptions.
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1788 – 1860 · German-languageArthur Schopenhauer
My body is the Will seen from outside; my will is my body felt from inside.
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1889 – 1976 · German-languageMartin Heidegger
The question is wrongly posed: we are not minds inside bodies but being-in-the-world, already involved with things and others.
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Today’s version — how does the brain produce consciousness? — is David Chalmers’s “hard problem”. Notice how many modern positions were anticipated: Aristotle’s hylomorphism, Spinoza’s dual-aspect monism, the Buddhist process view, Avicenna’s thought experiment.
Explore Next
related by shared connectionsDoes God Exist?
The proofs, the refutations, the wagers and the leaps — the great argument about God from the Upanishads to Nietzsche.
What Is the Self?
From ātman to anattā, from the cogito to the bundle, from Kierkegaard’s task of becoming oneself to Sartre’s nothingness.
Rationalism vs. Empiricism
The great quarrel of early modern philosophy — does knowledge come from reason or from experience? Kant tried to end it.
What Is Time?
Flux and permanence, the moving image of eternity, Augustine’s puzzle, Kant’s form of intuition, eternal recurrence, Heidegger’s temporality.
What Can We Know?
The relay race of epistemology — from Plato’s Cave to Kant’s categories, via Descartes’ demon and Hume’s billiard balls.
Al-Ghazālī
Theologian, jurist and mystic whose Incoherence of the Philosophers attacked Avicenna’s Aristotelianism, anticipated Hume on causation, and whose spiritual autobiography records a crisis of doubt.