The Soul Across Greek, Buddhist and Christian Thought

Jeffrey Mishlove opens with a confession. He will turn 80 this year, he tells his guest, and he is not the same person he was as a teenager. Emile Alexandrov, a philosopher formerly at the University of Tyumen and now an assistant professor at Waseda University in Tokyo, takes that remark and runs with it. Change, he argues, is where any serious inquiry into the soul has to start. What follows, recorded in Albuquerque on August 15, 2026, is a long walk through how Greek thinkers, medieval Christians, Buddhist meditators, Hindu traditions and Jungian psychologists each answered the same stubborn question: what in us persists through change, and does any of it survive death?

Why does the soul need a starting point at all?

Alexandrov's first objection is grammatical before it is metaphysical. "Automatically we give it a definite article," he says of the phrase "the soul," and that little word presumes a thing, a fixed object that can be pointed at. His own starting point is quieter. Look at the world of experience and nothing holds still. "Nothing stands still as Heraclitus would say," he tells Mishlove, and if everything around the observer is changing, the observer is changing too.

"When I look at the world of experience, things are always changing... Nothing stands still as Heraclitus would say. And so from there I would have to presume that as an observer I am changing too." (Alexandrov, interview, around 4:56)

That gives the inquiry its shape. If the self is in flux, then any account of soul must explain what stays aware while everything else moves. It is a modest-sounding premise, and it does a great deal of work over the next hour, because each tradition he surveys answers that question differently.

When did the soul become a concrete thing?

Alexandrov's answer is that the soul as a discrete, objectified entity is largely a later development. Before the Middle Ages, he argues, the claim could not be made decisively. The shift shows up clearly in Thomas Aquinas, whom Alexandrov describes as defining the soul through will accompanying intellect. Once a volition travels alongside reason, you have, in his words, "some form of objectified entity," a concreteness to the person. Aquinas justified this mainly through scripture, Alexandrov notes, and then added his own reasoning on top.

The significance is that the modern sense of soul, as an individual subject with a unique inner life, is a relatively recent lens. Alexandrov says plainly that "we are living in the modern paradigm of soul being a uniqueness, an individual, a subject," and that this is hard to account for when you look at ancient contexts. The ancient picture, by contrast, is built from reason rather than from personhood.

How did the Greeks place the soul inside a rational cosmos?

For the Greeks, the world itself was rational, and that rationality was something a thinking person could discern through experience. But every person grasps it only partially, which produces what Alexandrov calls "increasing grades of reason." On this view the soul is not a sealed-off possession. It is a fragment of a greater rationality, which Plato and Aristotle would call intellect. Everything else in the world can be understood more fully to the degree that one participates in greater reason.

Alexandrov is careful about where this leaves the modern reader. Plenty of people today would object that soul is about passion and emotion, the word we use when someone is "very soulful" and artistic. He does not dismiss that intuition. He simply points out that the ancient vocabulary of soul rests on intellect as its ground, and that this is the hardest thing for modern ears to hear.

Earlier still, Heraclitus gave the flux a principle. Alexandrov describes consistent change operating under the aegis of the logos, so that there is order inside the flux and the human being is subject to that order. Heraclitus, he says, does not articulate an elaborate cosmology, but he conveys the sense of it, and that sense carried into the early Middle Ages, when reason was taken to reign and the rationality of the world seemed to inhere in both subject and object, with no firm line between them.

Mishlove's reply captures the logic. Perhaps humans discover that they can reason and then project that capacity outward onto the whole, which gives us the idea of a world soul, the anima mundi. Alexandrov agrees that this is "beautifully put." The pattern repeats in the ninth century, when, by Alexandrov's reckoning, the Arabic philosopher al-Farabi, born around 870 and dying around 950, described an "aboutness" in things, a way the mind takes an object in and makes meaning of it. Look at a chair or a tree without interference, Alexandrov says, and then bring it inward, and you have the beginning of understanding.

What are Buddhists trying to silence in meditation?

This is where the conversation turns. Alexandrov contrasts two starting points. The Christian reading of the Greeks tends to treat soul as a concrete entity, though he suggests that reading is not as decisive in the Greek texts as Christians took it to be. The Buddhists, by contrast, take the opposite road and use meditation to narrow attention until you no longer register externals at all. "They're seeking that silencing," he explains, and to do it you have to silence "quite literally every aspect of human experience."

The discussion of anatta, the Buddhist doctrine of non-self, sits in this territory. Alexandrov's point is that the Buddhist method is not a retreat into nothingness but a deliberate subtraction, and what remains after subtraction is not an emptiness to be feared. The fear, he says, is widespread: people imagine oblivion, an abyss. He rejects that picture for Buddhism.

"The ultimately positive message of this is that it is not annihilation. This is what frightens a lot of people. They think about oblivion or an abyss. It's not... The idea is if you do silence all of this it is an unimaginable bliss." (Alexandrov, opening exchange)

The phrase "unimaginable bliss" is worth holding onto, because it reframes the whole Buddhist project as a question of what experience is left when nothing is clung to. The conversation keeps circling this idea.

Why does clinging keep coming back as the problem?

In the middle sections on desire and suffering, Alexandrov returns again and again to clinging. Desire, attachment and the grasping of the self are the mechanism by which people experience suffering, and he links the great tragedies of human life to the way we cling to what we are in so far as we cling. The point is not moralistic. It is structural: if the soul is the thing that holds onto experience, then the soul's identity is partly a matter of what it holds.

That structure is what makes the later questions about survival so difficult. If we cling to a self and the self is constituted by grasping, then what would count as surviving death? Alexandrov does not pretend the answer is easy, and he admits that the question of whether anything that survives remains individually identifiable is the hardest one of all.

Can anything survive death and still be recognizably you?

The video's description lists rebirth, karmic continuity and the possibility of survival after death among its core subjects, and the excerpt available here reaches the Christian material on resurrection. Alexandrov notes that the kingdom of God is not presented as a simple place or an automatic outcome, and he frames the Christian question of whether a person keeps an original identity through transformation as a real puzzle rather than a settled doctrine. Christianity's emphasis, as he presents it, is typically not on the body as such but on the person's relation to God and to the transformation that follows.

Across traditions, then, the survival question divides into two sub-questions. One asks whether anything continues. The other asks whether that continuing thing is still a particular someone. Buddhism, with its non-self teaching, pushes hardest on the second. Christianity keeps the individual at the center of its promise. Greek intellectualism locates the enduring part in a universal rational order, so that individuality is secondary to participation in reason.

The closing movement of the conversation, which the description ties to awareness itself, goes further. Alexandrov points toward a state he describes as perfect harmony and universal love, in which awareness understands itself. If the deepest continuity underlying all the changing ideas of soul is awareness, then the question of individual survival may be less about preserving a personal file and more about what consciousness is when it is no longer organized around clinging.

Where to go from here

Alexandrov's own work is the natural next step. He is the author of The Other Platonist Beginning and Metaphysics and Ineffable, both of which extend the questions raised here about intellect, the One and the limits of what can be said. Mishlove also points viewers to the earlier interview between the two, which he describes as a conversation on the romance of metaphysics, and says it is not a prerequisite but is well worth watching.

The full video moves beyond the material covered above. Its later chapters take up Russian cosmism, physical resurrection and transhumanism, and the description frames the closing argument around awareness as the possible continuity beneath every changing idea of the soul. Those are the sections to watch if you want to see where Alexandrov takes the argument once the traditions have been laid side by side.