Kevin Corcoran, ed., SOUL, BODY, AND SURVIVAL: ESSAYS ON THE METAPHYSICS OF HUMAN PERSONS (original) (raw)
Related papers
Philosophia Christi , 2014
As a contribution to the discussion over ramied natural theology, I put forward a some lines of thought for a distinctively Cartesian variation of natural theology that points in the direction of the Christian God as a mind and as personal. I propose that Cartesian natural theology, as commonly seen in the literature on substance dualism, see the soul as a “sign” or “pointer” to God such that we, as human persons, seem to have access to God’s nature and existence via the soul (mind) as a rationale for the world full of persons. On this basis, I respond to a common anti-Cartesian charge(s) from subjectivism and suggest that this approach deserves further consideration concerning theological prolegomena.
The Mind Body Problem: A Thomistic Critique of Cartesian Dualism
Thomistica, Sacra Doctrina Project, 2018
The mind-body problem became very clear following Descartes unique view of substance which flows from his understanding of the self as a thinking thing. He believed that mental substances were necessarily distinct from material substances, and that the total essence of the human person was the mind. Yet still, even he realized that there was an intimate connection between the mind and the body, and that we needed an explanation for precisely what the nature of this connection is. I will argue that not only did Descartes fail to find this connection between the mind and the body and how they interact with each other, but also that the system employed by St. Thomas Aquinas provides a much more coherent understanding of the relationship between the two. Adopting Aquinas' view of substance will provide a solution to the problem by avoiding altogether the position that man is made up of dual substances. Rather, Aquinas shows us that we can acknowledge a duality within substance itself, while maintaining its inherent substantial unity.
Pensamiento Revista De Investigacion E Informacion Filosofica, 2011
The scientifically attested assumption that the human mind has a physical substrate carries many consequences for the theological understanding of human beings and the fundamentals of religious experience. Even if the research program looking for a reduction of all mental functions to neurological processes is still far from completed, the steps already taken point to a need to reconsider several traditional views in Christian anthropology.
Journal of Analytic Theology
Christian Physicalism? Philosophical Theological Criticisms is an important contribution to the debate between physicalism and dualism regarding human persons, especially as it relates to Christian philosophical and theological commitments. The book is impressive in its scope, raising challenges for physicalism in metaphysics, philosophy of mind, personal identity, epistemology, neuroscience, physics, theology, and historical Christian thought, and in Christian doctrines such as the Incarnation, Holy Saturday, sanctification, the intermediate state, and the general resurrection. Physicalists-Christian or not-would do well to consider it. In this review, I summarize the central claims of each chapter and offer my commentary on a few of these claims. Due to limited space, I cannot provide commentary for each chapter. R. Keith Loftin and Joshua R. Farris highlight the importance of the debate between dualism and physicalism for Christian philosophy and theology in their introduction to Christian Physicalism? They note the rise in Christian physicalism among philosophers, theologians, and biblical scholars in the past twenty-five years and cite as motivations for this rise the success of the sciences and the belief "that the Scriptures yield a portrait of humans as unified, functionally integrated agents" (xvii). Yet they maintain that the sciences do not support physicalism, that dualism fares better than physicalism in accounting for biblical and philosophical data, and that dualism is more consistent with Nicene Christianity than physicalism. Christian Physicalism? supports each of these claims. In "The Incorporeality of the Soul in Patristic Thought," Paul L. Gavrilyuk rejects the claim by some contemporary scholars that early Christian thinkers adopted "Greek dualism" over biblical anthropology. Gavrilyuk first distinguishes between "ontological" and "anthropological" dualism in Greek thought, the former of which postulates "two independent sources of good and evil" and the latter of which considers "human beings to be soul-body composites" (2). He then makes several claims based on this distinction. First, most early Christian thinkers rejected ontological dualism. As for anthropological dualism, there was no single Greek view of human nature. Further, while most early Christian thinkers accepted the incorporeality of the soul for philosophical and theological reasons, they disagreed over the soul's nature and did not simply integrate Platonic dualism with Christian anthropology.
Cognitive dualism, ontological dualism, and the question of God
Philosophy, 2019
Roger Scruton is not much interested in the God of the typical philosopher of religion, and his work is of great significance to those, like myself, for whom questions of spirituality and praxis are just as important as those pertaining to metaphysics and theory. I have been equally drawn to his cognitive dualism – a position which promises to accommodate the sense in which the world has its source in God, but without this requiring that God and the world are to be viewed in conjunctive, separatist terms. Scruton’s position is not easy to pin down, and some of what he says suggests an implicit commitment to the ontological dualism he purports to reject. In what follows I spell out the relevant tensions, and clarify what it means to be an ontological or a cognitive dualist in this context. The positive position at which I arrive involves a form of cognitive dualism, and it grants a distinction between God and world, albeit with no concession to the offending form of ontological dualism. It also accords with much of what Scruton himself says, although there is no longer any motive for insisting that ‘things in themselves’ lie on the far and inaccessible side of thought, nor that the concept of the supernatural ‘must be severed from any ontological claims’. I conclude that such a position makes for a more consistent theistic picture.
European Journal of Science and Theology, 2019
Emergentism is a paradigm often used to bridge the worlds of Science and religion through complex lawful processes connecting the mind to the physical world (i.e., where the mind, construed as a property or a substance, is the lawful consequent of some highly complex neural structure or the brain is the proximate cause of the mind). In recent discussions, some philosophers and theologians have even gone so far as to use the emergence concept as a way to bridge God to the physical world. However, with some pushback in the philosophy of mind, we are beginning to notice a shift closer to older models of the mind. In the present article, I show why this is a good move. I go on to argue that that emergent-theism(s) confront significant challenges given the models of laws on offer and that something like Cartesian theism seems to have the resources to accommodate the regularities of natural or physical events, the potential irregularities (e.g., the origination of minds), and has some resources to capture the benefits of contemporary emergent-theism(s). http://www.ejst.tuiasi.ro/Files/75/5\_Farris.pdf