Do Animals Have Souls - Philosophy
Philosophy Explorer wroteI ask myself why would only human beings have souls.
Do animals have souls - philosophy. Yes animals have a soul. Even if animals cannot be said to have full-blown free will animal powers of various sorts provide a kind of essential underpinning for free will which philosophers who focus too exclusively on the human phenomenon are forever in danger of ignoring. We are motivated far more by passion than by intellect what we feel deeply is what drives us for good and ill.
Voltaire the great enlightenment writer and philosopher once said Nobody thinks of giving an immortal soul to a flea Now nearly 300 years later the mass of accumulated scientific evidence suggests we may have to. So I cant see why they cant have souls too. Not only for Humans animals but also for inert things.
For Cudworth it was clear that an animal is much more like a living feeling human than an inanimate machine. Instead Cudworth argued that animals like humans have souls. Well animals do have consciousness and awareness and intelligence and some morality too maybe more than humans on that last point.
Just to add to thisyou should never ever trust anybody just because they say so. They have beliefs they have intentions they have desires they have sensationsor they appear to. For after all animals had bodies and flesh just as.
A Creative Approach to Life 1970 the late psychoanalyst Alexander Lowen meditated on these connections proposing that The soul of a man is in his body. The general view is that animals do have souls. This is what the Sages teach.
So animals just like us dont have them. Our souls are rationaltheirs arentand ours are rational because theyre spiritual not material. Ergo animals have souls like human beings have souls.