Philosophical anthropology, sometimes called anthropological philosophy, is a discipline dealing with questions of metaphysics and phenomenology of the human person. History Plato identified the human essence with the soul, affiriming that the material body is its prison from which the soul yearnes for to be liberated because it wants to see, know and contemplate the pure hyperuranic ideas. According to the Phaedrus, after death, souls transmigrate from a body to another. Therefore Plato introduced an irreducible mind–body dualism. Aristotle defined the man as the union of two substances, the body and the soul, within the socalled theory of hylomorphism. Man is a type of animal with a specific characteristic that makes him superior than any other living entity: it is the rational soul. The soul is not something of extraneous to the body, but it is the principle that organizes, structures, gives life and form to the body's matter. The Aristotelian soul's conception is described in the threaty On the Soul from a theoretical point of view, and in the Politics and Nicomachean Ethics from a practical one. The Christian thought developed the concept of creatio ex nihilo according to which all what exists is a contingent creature of God, including matter. The Platonic khôra ended to be a region out of the Logos' power. Time started to be conceived within a linear and not yet a cyclic becoming. Christianity also developed the notion of person in order to explain the Most Holy Trinity and the co-existence of the human and divine nature (essence) in the unique person of Christ. Ancient Christian writers: Augustine of Hippo Augustine of Hippo was one of the first Christian ancient Latin authors with a very clear anthropological vision, although it is not clear if he had any influence on Max Scheler, the founder of philosophical anthropology as an independent discipline, nor on any of the major philosophers that followed him. Augustine has been cited by Husserl and Heidegger as one of the early writers to inquire on time-consciousness and the role of seeing in the feeling of "Being-in-the-world". Augustine saw the human being as a perfect unity of two substances: soul and body. He was much closer in this anthropological view to Aristotle than to Plato. In his late treatise On Care to Be Had for the Dead sec. 5 (420 AD) he insisted that the body is essential part of the human person: