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church fathers to be clear on this point is the basis for a doubt about whether
some of them even believed in personal survival of bodily death, in the sense in
which we would understand personal survival today.
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In addition to the question of whether people survive bodily death, there are
the further questions: first, of whether it matters whether they survive it and,
second, if it does matter, why it matters. In general, Plato had an easier time
explaining why it matters whether people survive their bodily deaths. Appar-
ently he thought that people would be helped in discovering eternal truths if
they could get away from bodily distractions. In addition, he tells us that Socrates,
in one of his last thoughts, mused about the joys of conversing with the dead.
Apparently, then, Plato (or Socrates) thought that since people in the afterlife
can converse about earthly
events, their souls retain their premortem memories
and other mental dispositions. If Plato looked forward to conversing with the
dead, he must have thought that people are entitled to anticipate having the
experiences of their postmortem selves. It is not clear what Aristotle’s views were
on any of these topics. In general, Plato had a more unified way than Aristotle of
insuring the immortality of each individual’s soul, but Aristotle had a more uni-
fied way of explaining the soul’s relationship to the body.
After Aristotle died, many commentators on his work arose. One of the most
important historically was Alexander of Aphrodisias (fl. 200 c.e.), who became
head of the Lyceum at Athens. In antiquity, he became famous for writing com-
mentaries on Aristotle that were intended to reestablish Aristotle’s views in their
pure form. In the Middle Ages, he also became well known for his original writ-
ings, including On the Soul, in which he argued that human mentality is a mix-
ture of “mortal” and “active” intellects. Only the active intellect, he claimed,
which is the same in all humans and in God, survives bodily death. Needless to
add, its surviving bodily death is not a way to insure any particular human per-
son’s individual personal survival.
Materialistic Atomism
In addition to the tradition in Greek thought that went through Plato and
Aristotle, then to Plotinus, and afterwards to the church fathers, there was a
perhaps equally influential tradition of materialistic atomism. Thinkers in
this tradition included the atomists Leucippus (fl. 440 b.c.e.) and Democritus
(460?-370? b.c.e.), who were responsible for the original formulation of the
idea that the world is composed of material atoms but who had nothing to
say, so far as we know, about the self and personal identity. That task was left
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