Losing the Soul, Finding Ourselves

Key points

Author David Barash shows the soul has no scientific basis, dismantling every traditional definition.

He exposes the harms of soul-belief, from restricting women’s rights to excusing cruelty toward animals.

A soul-free worldview, he argues, is liberating, freeing us from fear and deepening our appreciation of life.

With graceful prose, he offers a compelling case for a mindful, material understanding of humanity.

For most of Western history, the soul was the master key to human nature, the invisible essence that thinkers from Plato to Descartes believed set us apart from animals, grounded morality , and housed the mind itself. Psychology, in its earliest form, was literally the “study of the soul.” Mental illness was treated as a disturbance of this fragile inner essence.