Harry Potter and Life Sources or "The Soul"

So, I'm still jumping the gun on what we are supposed to post on but I just keep running into awesome fun stuff.  Souls play a huge part in the Harry Potter story. At different points in the books, Harry, Sirius, and Dudley narrowly avoid having their souls sucked out by dementors; Barty Crouch, Jr., does not escape this fate. And notoriously, Voldemort intentionally creates six Horcruxes, thereby dividing his own soul into seven parts, all of which must be destroyed before Voldemort can die.

So what is the soul? In Harry Potter’s world people have souls that generally survive bodily death. But it is not entirely obvious how souls work and what their nature is. Over the centuries, philosophers and theologians have proposed and debated various accounts of the soul. So in this lil’ blog I’m gonna look at how souls work in Rowling’s books and whether her picture of the soul is plausible according to our wonderful friend, Descartes.
On a view associated with the philosopher René Descartes (1596- 1650), the soul is not responsible for sensation and awareness. Descartes thought that those features of mental life could be accounted for by purely material causes. However, Descartes thought that mere material causes would never be able to explain our ability to use language and formulate complex beliefs; for this we need souls. So Descartes said that our immaterial soul is responsible only for higher-level cognitive functions, including beliefs, desires, and, especially, our ability to use language.
One consequence of the Cartesian view is that non-human animals do not have souls, at least if those animals lack linguistic ability and higher-level thought. Thus, I assume Descartes would be willing to accept this, and thought that non-human animals were entirely soulless. Some of the magical creatures in the Harry Potter stories might blur this distinction within the Cartesian view. For instance, owls seem to understand human speech, though they don’t speak in return, and magical pets like Crookshanks seem much more intelligent than your average cat.
On the life-source, sentience, and Cartesian views, the soul is usually thought to be some sort of immaterial substance, something not made of matter but still associated with, or connected to, a person’s material body. If souls are in fact like that, then there is a possibility that the soul could survive a person’s bodily death. On the other hand, there are many philosophers and scientists who would deny the existence of a soul, if what we mean by a soul is some sort of entity independent of the brain and body. Took some time on this and it was super fun! Please give me some feedback if you have any response or rebuttal. I could expand this pretty heavily as far as different views go but as this is our biggest topic in my philosophy course I will have to limit it to one for now. J