I have argued in many places that a carefully articulated version of Descartes’ argument to show that he is essentially an immaterial soul is sound. It is conceivable that I who am currently conscious continue to exist without my body, and that can only be if there is currently a non-bodily part of me which alone is essential for me. Recent counter-arguments of Alston and Smythe, Moser and van der Nat, Zimmerman, and Shoemaker are rejected.

In Are We Bodies or Souls? Richard Swinburne presents an updated formulation and defense of his dualist theory of the human person. On this theory, human persons are compound substances, composed of both bodies and souls. The soul is the only essential component of the human person, however, and so each of us could, in principle, continue to exist without our bodies, composed of nothing more than our souls. As Swinburne himself points out, his theory of the human person shares (...) many similarities with the hylomorphic theory of the human person espoused by Thomas Aquinas. Swinburne suggests at one point that the differences between the two theories are “almost entirely terminological,” pertaining chiefly to how each understands the term ‘substance’. In this essay, I aim to show that the differences between Swinburne’s Cartesian substance dualism and Thomistic hylomorphism are much more significant than that. I argue, moreover, that the distinctive claims of Thomistic hylomorphism allow it to successfully avoid some key concerns for Swinburne’s view. (shrink)

Substance dualism says that all thinking beings are immaterial. This sits awkwardly with the fact that thinking requires an intact brain. Many dualists say that bodily activity is causally necessary for thinking. But if a material thing can cause thinking, why can’t it think? No argument for dualism, however convincing, answers this question, leaving dualists with more to explain than their opponents.

This article addresses the question of the object of psychology in the context of recent attempts in philosophy of mind to restore the concept of the soul in the framework of a strong anthropological dualism. After an historical and philosophical explanation of the modern dismissal of the human soul as the object of psychology, this article provides a critical examination of the new turn to dualism by reference to an exemplary case. It is shown that apriorism and spiritualism are the (...) two fundamental problems that explain neodualism’s inefficacy to provide a convincing argument for the restoration of the substantial soul as the object of psychology. Finally, certain guidelines for a new approach to this question are proposed in rudimentary form. (shrink)

Physicalist Christology is the view that God the Son, in the Incarnation, became identical with the body of Jesus. The goal of this paper is to defend PC from two recent objections. One is that if GS is a physical object, then he cannot have properties had by God. Then, by Leibniz’s law, the incarnate GS cannot be identical with the second Person of the Trinity. The other objection is that PC implies that the incarnate GS did not exist in (...) the interim period between his death and resurrection. PC then leads to the theologically absurd consequence that one of the three Persons of the Trinity did not exist during this period. I argue that the first objection fails because the very same argumentative strategy applies to the Incarnation on any view. As for the second objection, I endorse an animalist theory of death and argue that the incarnate GS continues to exist as a dead person from his death to resurrection. This shows that there is still continuing Trinity of GS during this period. (shrink)

It is common to think that it’s possible for entities to spatially coincide in multiple ways: with overcrowding, and without overcrowding. Typically, we can distinguish between these by claiming that uncrowded spatial overlap involves a sharing of parts, and crowded spatial overlap does not. However, if we think that mereologically unusual entities, such as extended simples or some kinds of gunk, can also spatially overlap in crowded and uncrowded ways, we lose the ability to distinguish between those varieties of spatial (...) overlap via appeal to shared parts. Thus, we should either reject the possibilities that generated this difficulty, or we must look for an alternative explanation of these varieties of spatial overlap. (shrink)

Psychological accounts of personal identity claim that the human person is not identical to the human animal. Advocates of such accounts maintain that the definition and criterion of death for a human person should differ from the definition and criterion of death for a human animal. My contention is instead that psychological accounts of personal identity should have human persons dying deaths that are defined biologically, just like the deaths of human animals. Moreover, if brain death is the correct criterion (...) for the death of a human animal, then it is also the correct criterion for the death of a human person. What the nonidentity of persons and animals requires is only that they have distinct criteria for ceasing to exist. (shrink)

There are three families of solutions to the traditional Amputation Paradox: Eliminativism, Contingent Identity Theories, and Theories of Coincident Entities. Theories of Coincident Entities challenge our common understanding of the relation between identity and parthood, since they accept that two things can be mereologically coincident without being identical. The contemporary discussion of the Amputation Paradox tends to mention only one theory of Coincident Entities, namely the Constitution View, which violates the mereological principle of Extensionality. But in fact, there is another (...) theory, namely the Unique Part View, which violates another mereological principle. In this paper, I argue that the contemporary focus on the Constitution View is unmotivated, at least when we are confronted with the Amputation Paradox, and that a balanced comparison of the two views should favour the Unique Part View. (shrink)

Catholic opponents of abortion and embryonic stem cell research usually base their position on a hylomorphic account of ensoulment at fertilization. They maintain that we each started out as one-cell ensouled organisms. Critics of this position argue that it is plagued by a number of intractable problems due to fission (twinning) and fusion. We're unconvinced that such objections to early ensoulment provide any reason to doubt the coherence of the hylomorphic account. However, we do maintain that a defense of ensoulment (...) at fertilization must deny that we're essentially organisms. (shrink)

I introduce and argue for a Priority Principle, according to which we exemplify certain of our mental properties in the primary or non-derivative sense. I then apply this principle to several debates in the metaphysics and philosophy of mind.

Among the mysterious and wondrous characteristics of minds, the deepest and most mysterious one, yet also the most overlooked, is their particularity. It is a special and most fundamental kind of particularity: each of us experiences life through their own, private, unique, and non-duplicable perspective, which is what fundamentally differentiates him/her from the rest of the universe and gives him/her their unique identity. There is an infinity of possible first-person perspectives, and each mind has a unique one. The particular perspective (...) of each mind is accessible only from within that mind itself while from the outside it is indistinguishable from the infinity of other existing or possible perspectives. For the rest of the universe, what is particular about a certain mind is completely hidden. The paper begins with a consideration of the "pairing problem", i.e. of how minds are paired to bodies, which serves to elucidate this concept of particularity of minds. If the mind is reducible to fundamental phenomena associated with a body’s physics or material constitution, then the pairing rule should be traceable there. Which particular mind will emerge from a particular body (i.e. whether it will be me, you, or someone else) should depend/supervene on either the particular structure of that body, or on the particular matter that constitutes it. But it can depend/supervene on neither: on one hand, bodily structure is duplicable but particular minds are not (if exact copies of my body were made, I would not also be paired to those other bodies; other persons would be. All those bodies would be structurally identical, so the structure of the body cannot determine the particularity of the person paired to it), and on the other hand the particular matter that constitutes our bodies changes every day but we remain the same persons. The paper then proceeds to deeper arguments: The uniqueness of a mind's particularity, its complete hiddenness from the rest of the universe, and its complete external similarity with the particularities of all other minds makes it impossible that it is dependent on anything external to it, making the mind an independent substance. (shrink)

Substance dualism has received much attention from philosophers and theologians in contemporary literature. Whilst it may have been fashionable in the recent past to dismiss substance dualism as an unviable and academically absurd position to hold, this is no longer the case. My contention is not so much the merits of substance dualism in general, but a more specified variation of substance dualism. My specific contribution to the literature in this article is that I argue for the viability of pure (...) substance dualism as a more satisfactory option in contrast to compound or composite varieties of substance dualism. I put forth one argument and tease out the implications that make compound dualism less than satisfactory. I conclude that, minimally, more work is required on compound variations of dualism to make it a more appealing and a philosophically satisfactory option. (shrink)