The Blackwell Companion to Substance Dualism

Jonathan J. Loose, Angus J. L. Menuge, J. P. Moreland, Jonathan J. Loose, Angus J. L. Menuge, J. P. Moreland

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781119375302
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Geist & Körper in der Philosophie

THE BLACKWELL COMPANION TO SUBSTANCE DUALISM

"This is a terrific volume … by a long way, the best currently available anthology on dualism, and a worthy addition to Blackwell's distinguished series of Companions."
Tim Crane, Central European University

"A major contribution to an ongoing transformation of analytic philosophy of mind."
Howard Robinson, Central European University

"This high quality volume offers a rich variety of perspectives on substance dualism and will be a valuable resource for students and researchers in philosophy of mind and philosophy of religion."
John Cottingham, University of Reading

"Thorough and fair … the quality of the essays is high. This will certainly be the book on substance dualism."
Michael Tye, University of Texas at Austin

Substance dualism has for some time been dismissed as an archaic and defeated position in philosophy of mind, but in recent years, the topic has experienced a resurgence of scholarly interest and has been restored to contemporary prominence by a growing minority of philosophers prepared to interrogate the core principles upon which past objections and misunderstandings rest. As the first book of its kind to bring together a collection of contemporary writing from top proponents and critics in a pro-contra format, the Blackwell Companion to Substance Dualism captures this ongoing dialogue and sets the stage for rigorous and lively discourse around dualist and physicalist accounts of human persons in philosophy.

Chapters explore emergent, Thomistic, Cartesian, and other forms of substance dualism — broadly conceived — in dialogue with leading varieties of physicalism, including animalism, non-reductive physicalism, and constitution theory. Loose, Menuge, and Moreland pair essays from dualist advocates with astute criticism from physicalist opponents and vice versa, highlighting points of contrast for readers in thematic sections while showcasing today's leading minds engaged in direct debate. Taken together, essays provide nuanced paths of introduction for students, and capture the imagination of professional philosophers looking to expand their understanding of the subject.

Skillfully curated and in touch with contemporary science as well as analytic theology, the Blackwell Companion to Substance Dualism strikes a measured balanced between advocacy and criticism, and is a first-rate resource for researchers, scholars, and students of philosophy, theology, and neuroscience.

1
Introduction
Substance Dualism and Its Physicalist Rivals

Jonathan J. Loose, Angus J. L. Menuge and J. P. Moreland

To say the least, substance dualism has not enjoyed good public relations within academic philosophy, or for that matter, within related disciplines, such as psychology, biology, or neuroscience. So it is natural that some readers will want to know how, and even why, this volume came about. In this introduction – and more fully in the book itself – we hope to show that due to recent developments within the philosophy of mind, a renewed interest in historical and contemporary theories of the soul, and a more careful evaluation of what does and does not follow from neuroscience, substance dualism is back on the table for a serious critical reevaluation.

At the outset, it is important to be clear that, unless otherwise indicated by an individual author, this volume will understand “substance dualism” in a very broad sense that is by no means exhausted by the Cartesian variety. By “substance dualism” we mean the generic view that (1) there is a substantial self, soul, or ego that is immaterial and (2) that self, soul, or ego is not identical to the body and is the bearer of personal identity. Given the variety of theories about what constitutes a substance (or substance-like entity), substance dualism thus defined is compatible not only with Cartesian dualism but also with a number of non-Cartesian alternatives, including several varieties of Thomistic (or neo-Thomistic) dualism, Hasker's emergent subject dualism, and the holistic anthropology of E. J. Lowe.

We will see that substance dualists and their many critics have been brought together by a shared focus on the nature of mental subjects. And, as much is at stake, including the tenability of the reigning doctrine of naturalism, it is not surprising that the debate is intense. From the beginning, we therefore felt that the only fair way to present this new development – the return of the subject to the center stage of philosophy of mind – is to construct a level playing ground of debate for all of the various positions and their critics, in hopes that readers can decide for themselves where the better arguments lie.

We will begin with a brief explanation of why this book is timely (Section 1.1), then review in more detail recent developments in the philosophy of mind (Section 1.2) and in scholarship on the soul (Section 1.3). We conclude by considering the broad implications of the return of the subject for the larger question of the tenability of naturalism (Section 1.4) and give a brief outline of the structure of the book (Section 1.5), followed by summaries of each chapter (Section 1.6).

1.1 An Inconceivable Book?

1.1.1 The Official Doctrine

Go back a few decades and the idea of a wide-ranging scholarly examination of the merits of substance dualism would have seemed outlandish. Dennett captured the mood at the time when he wrote, “it is widely granted these days that dualism is not a serious view to contend with, but rather a cliff over which to push one's opponents” (Dennett 1978, 252). While in some cases incredulity about substance dualism has resulted from sophisticated but ultimately resolvable difficulties such as those raised by Wittgenstein's discussion of private language (2009 [1953]), most professional philosophers are simply inoculated against any version of substance dualism by a seemingly unanswerable objection firmly impressed on their minds during their very first class. Descartes argued that the soul and body are substances of fundamentally different kinds, the one an immaterial, indivisible thinking thing with no spatial extension, the other a material, divisible entity that necessarily occupies space. A standard rhetorical question follows: how can substances of such fundamentally different kinds possibly causally interact, as Descartes maintains that they do? It seems inconceivable that items not sharing a common medium (space) could influence one another, and Descartes's well-known replies to Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia's pointed questions on this issue look like the hand-waving of an ancien régime, about to be swept aside by a scientific outlook that has no room for the soul.

In his day, Gilbert Ryle (1949) complained that an essentially Cartesian view of the mind was still part of the “official doctrine” about the nature of consciousness. But for most twentieth-century philosophers of mind it was the perceived failure of substance dualism in general that deserves that title. It was assumed that Descartes's version of substance dualism had been fully understood, found irredeemably flawed, and that other versions, if they were considered at all, were subject to the same fatal defect. The Cartesian vignette that has for decades adorned almost every introductory class in philosophy is one of many reasons that twentieth-century philosophy of mind was dominated by research programs that ignored an understanding of the conscious subject (apparently too much like a Cartesian ego), but instead focused on scientifically tractable aspects of cognition, such as the explanation of behavior and the relation between mental and physical states and events. While behaviorism soon fell, philosophy of mind embraced a physicalist research program, according to which mental states either are, or are entirely determined by, physical states of the organism. For many still today, the triumph of physicalism, as the attempt to integrate human beings into a consistent, scientifically grounded picture of the world, is so complete that the soul must be dismissed, along with epicycles, the humors, and phlogiston, as outmoded and redundant.

1.1.2 Fault Lines in Physicalism

How then, could substance dualism have earned the right to a serious, well-rounded, critical examination? To some, this will still appear as unmotivated as a contemporary reevaluation of alchemy. But the truth is far different from the simplistic narrative of Cartesian failure and physicalist triumph. One problem is that, while physicalism has generated an extraordinary variety of theories of the mind, they generally have serious, if not fatal, problems. Not only that, but there is also a recurring pattern of failure, that suggests there is something wrong, not with the specific details of a given account, but with the whole approach. In one way or another, these theories fail to capture basic aspects of the mind, such as phenomenal consciousness, intentionality, and even rational thought. They do not seem to capture accurately what it is like to feel pain, the fact that my thought can be about something beyond itself (including future, fictional, and even necessarily nonexistent entities that cannot causally explain the thought), or the fact that my thought can access and be governed by noncontingent norms of logic.

As a result, there has been a move toward theories of mind that embrace some version of emergentism, a nonreductive version of physicalism which allows that novel mental qualities and powers may emerge from the right physical base. But now some difficult questions arise. How far can emergence go before it abandons core doctrines of physicalism? At what point does emergence become a form of dualism under a different name, if it effectively concedes most of what dualists have maintained about the distinctive characteristics of the mind? That these are serious questions is shown by the fact that there are emergent subject dualists (Hasker 1999, and this volume), as well as emergent physicalists. We will explore the move from standard physicalism to emergentism in more depth in Section 1.2.

Another problem with our opening narrative is that scientifically minded modern people, including analytic philosophers, have often spent very little time investigating the soul. Perhaps a majority are unaware that there are many, quite different views of the nature and function of the soul. And even in Descartes's case, reliance on a brief caricature may have obscured a more accurate and fair understanding of his theory of the soul. In recent years there has been an explosion of research on the soul, mining the historical sources, adopting some of their insights, but also proposing constructive modifications to handle well-known problems and objections. We will survey some of this thinking in Section 1.3.

1.1.3 The Return of the Subject

As it happens, these two threads – the fault lines in physicalism and the reconsideration of the soul – draw together in a fascinating sea change in the philosophy of mind. While standard versions of physicalism were largely atomistic, focusing on particular mental states and events, there is an increasing recognition that philosophy of mind must address the nature of mental subjects. One of the most puzzling things about conscious mental states is that they are intrinsically subjective and, of course, subjectivity requires a subject. For many, it is strongly inconceivable that thoughts and experiences be ownerless: there cannot be an experience of a sunset that is no one's experience, or a thought that the sunset is beautiful that is no one's thought. But if that is right, then thoughts and experiences cannot be understood as independent atoms: their nature and existence depends on a unified whole to which they necessarily belong. And, embarrassingly enough, the person who insisted on this point – that thoughts are not detachable from thinkers – was our friend Descartes.

A mental subject, it seems, is a basic precondition of thought, just as Descartes said, so that Ryle's behaviorism was guilty (quite literally) of changing the subject, by refusing to speak of something essential to our mental lives. Attention to this fact has led to a fascinating development in the philosophy of the mind in recent years, what we have called the return of the subject. Even those resolutely opposed to the Cartesian paradigm increasingly feel compelled to offer some account of the origin and nature of mental subjects. Hard questions again arise. Can the subject be accommodated without allowing Descartes an unwelcome revenge on his many critics? Jaegwon Kim (1998, 46) had already noted that the same problem of causal interaction raised for Descartes at the level of mental and physical substances reappears for non-Cartesian property dualists at the level of mental and physical properties. But if everyone (beyond those eliminativists who implausibly deny conscious phenomena altogether) must give an account of mental subjects, it is not obvious that an appeal to “emergence” will save these accounts from facing a question uncomfortably like the one posed to Descartes.

This is by no means a counsel of despair, partly because several philosophers have pointed out that there is something wrong with the question. Hume taught us that there is no logical connection between causes and effects, that causes do not even have to be like their effects, and that we often have very good reason to think that two kinds of events are causally related without knowing how. And Hume's point seems correct even if one does not embrace his view of causation.

If this is true in general about causation, then the fact that we lack a fully adequate account of how mind and body interact does nothing to discredit the overwhelming prima facie case that they do (Swinburne 2013). And critics of Descartes typically operate from an event-causal paradigm that fails to take seriously the idea of substance causation anyway. As Lowe (2008) and Swinburne (2013) have argued, if there are substances with basic causal powers, it is much less obvious why a mental substance could not have the power to influence (and be influenced by) the physical world.

In any event, there is no doubt that contemporary philosophy of mind has seen a major shift toward an attempt to understand the mental subject, with book-length studies of the unity of consciousness, the self, and the first-person perspective (Searle 2001, 2007; Tye 2003; Bayne 2012; Baker 2013).

Another of the hard questions is whether this return of the subject is really a good fit for naturalism as the dominant approach to philosophy. One might raise the question of whether theism is more plausible than naturalism as an explanation of the existence of mental subjects. We will return to this theme in Section 1.4.

As the subject has moved to center stage, another development has been a broader understanding of what may qualify as “substance dualism.” In this sense, not all of today's substance dualists would accept Descartes's view that mental and physical substances are in principle independent of one another. Some take the view that while mental subjects have powers different from physical brains, the mental subjects are still ontologically dependent on those brai...