'Soul' seems another of those ancient religious ideas that still persist in modern times; mainly due to that Catholic Coward: Rene Descartes with his dualistic copout, splitting off 'spirit' from matter.
I prefer to see 'spirit' as an intuition of relationships between people or the activity of an animal - like thinking. Aristotle took the easy road in his metaphysics, by proposing a SINGLE solution to the idea of BEING (or existence); his answer was SUBSTANCE, the 'secret sauce' that distinguished every object/event/activity in reality. This reduced philosophy/science to cataloguing all the types of substance each with its own VERBAL definition (Intensional concept method). Most people prefer the prototype intuitive approach (Extension) to their understanding of concepts, even when they cannot verbalize them. This linguistic (verbal) preference promotes intellectuals to the summits of society. Our Global Coming Collapse shows the urgent need for a new, radical approach to communities.
A humanistic, non-reductionist view of human souls (read "Coming to Mind: The Soul and Its Body”) opens up the interesting philosophical topic of human flourishing. Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum have written about human flourishing in their respective capabilities approaches. The soul is the realm of moral capabilities. Issues concerning love, freedom, education, et cetera are soular, therefore the soul is still interesting to moral philosophers.
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