ABSTRACT
This chapter describes soul and body underscores sharply contrasting conceptual schemes and incommensurable languages encountered in science and religion. It explains the problem of the instantiation or infusion of the soul into the body and explores the problem of motion. For centuries animate motion was explained in terms of the operation of the soul, but such explanations have been challenged by the slow and measured development of purely mechanistic explanations of movement. Popular interest in gendered souls is manifested in extensive online discourses exploring a great range of theologies and problems such as whether a soul departing the body at death retains the sexual identity that it had in life. Descartes' theory had heuristic value by generating an outpouring of work that provided the foundations for the new sciences of physiology and neurology. There are different moral and religious implications associated with psychogenic identity theory and emergentism.
