alt Hacker News> During the Middle Ages, Western civilization described humans as composed of two distinct entities: body and soul.
This is absolutely, completely, demonstrably false. Soul-body dualism was largely a 17th-century innovation, although Plato somewhat anticipated it. Most medieval Catholic thought rejected it (and continues to do so), being quite clear that the soul/mind and the body are one entity. How can people in good conscience write about things they're so ignorant of?
Gell-Mann suggests I don't read the rest of the article. A brief scan reveals a rehash of the common assertions with no serious attempt to reply to counterarguments.
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"Augustine of Hippo was perhaps the greatest Christian philosopher of Antiquity and certainly the one who exerted the deepest and most lasting influence. He is a saint of the Catholic Church, and his authority in theological matters was universally accepted in the Latin Middle Ages and remained, in the Western Christian tradition, virtually uncontested till the nineteenth century."
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"...he nevertheless remained convinced that soul is an incorporeal and immortal substance that can, in principle, exist independently of a body"
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/augustine/#AnthGodSoulSou...
>...[God says] all souls are mine; as the soul of the father, so also the soul of the son is mine: the soul that sinneth, it shall die.
from the book of
>prophet Ezekiel, exiled in Babylon, during the 22 years from 593 to 571 BC