 Huan Tan receives a special section here, unlike other of his contemporaries such as Liu Xin, because of his influence on the philosophy of the rest of the Eastern Han, both in argumentative style and in content. In Huan’s major philosophical work, Xinlun (“New Discourses”), which only exists today in fragmentary form, he offered a naturalistic and physicalistic view of mind/spirit (jingshen 精神), arguing that the spirit is dependent on and linked to the body, and that it thus dies with the death of the body. In this way, Huan criticizes what he takes to be superstitious views accepting the existence of ghosts or disembodied spirits. He also objected to the popular practices of the time of seeking of immortality through alchemy, physical techniques, or intellectual cultivation. We cannot, Huan argued, forestall the natural decline and ultimate death of the human organism. This critical spirit taking aim at earlier non-physicalistic views comes to mark a number of thinkers in the Eastern Han, most prominently Wang Chong. Huan describes the connection between the conscious spirit (jingshen) and the body (xing) thus, in discussing what he takes to be the wrongheadedness of the life-extension techniques of esoteric Daoists: