Roczniki Filozoficzne, 2021, Tom 69, Nr 1

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12153/1745

Browse

Browsing Roczniki Filozoficzne, 2021, Tom 69, Nr 1 by Issue Date

Filter results by year or month
Now showing 1 - 11 of 11
  • Item
    The Dualist Project and the Remote-Control Objection
    (Towarzystwo Naukowe KUL, Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski Jana Pawła II, 2021-03-10) Olson, Eric T.
    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.
  • Item
    No Work for a Theory of Personal Identity
    (Towarzystwo Naukowe KUL, Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski Jana Pawła II, 2021-03-19) Schwenkler, John
    A main element in Richard Swinburne’s (2019) argument for substance dualism concerns the conditions of a person’s continued existence over time. In this commentary I aim to question two things: first, whether the kind of imaginary cases that Swinburne relies on to make his case should be accorded the kind of weight he supposes; and second, whether philosophers should be concerned to give any substantial theory, of the sort that dualism and its competitors are apparently meant to provide, to explain the conditions of personal identity after all. My suggestion, instead, will be that the concept of a person’s continued existence is better taken as philosophically unanalysable.
  • Item
    Are We Embodied Souls?
    (Towarzystwo Naukowe KUL, Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski Jana Pawła II, 2021-03-19) Taliaferro, Charles
    It is argued that Swinburne should stress the functional unity of soul and body under most healthy conditions. Too often, critics of substance dualism charge dualists with promoting a problematic bifurcation between soul and body. Swinburne’s work is defended against objections from Thomas Nagel. It is argued that Swinburne’s appeal to the first-person point of view is sound.
  • Item
    Summary of Are We Bodies or Souls?
    (Towarzystwo Naukowe KUL, Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski Jana Pawła II, 2021-03-19) Swinburne, Richard
  • Item
    Response to Essays on Are We Bodies or Souls?
    (Towarzystwo Naukowe KUL, Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski Jana Pawła II, 2021-03-19) Swinburne, Richard
    This paper consists of my responses to the comments by nine commentators on my book Are we Bodies or Souls? It makes twelve separate points, each one relevant to the comments of one or more of the commentators, as follows: (1) I defend my understanding of “knowing the essence” of an object as knowing a set of logically necessary and sufficient conditions for an object to be that object; (2) I claim that there cannot be thoughts without a thinker; (3) I argue that my distinction of “mental” from “physical” events in terms of whether anyone has privileged access to whether or not they occur, is a clear one; (4) and (5) I defend my account of metaphysical modality and its role in defending my account of personal identity; (6) I defend my view that Descartes’s argument in favor of the view that humans are essentially souls fails, but that my amended version of that argument succeeds; (7) I claim that my theory acknowledges the closeness of the connection in an earthly life between a human soul and its body; (8) I argue that my Cartesian theory of the soul-body relation is preferable to Aquinas’s theory of that; (9) I argue that a material thing cannot have mental properties; (10) I argue that any set of logically necessary conditions for an object to be the object it is, which together form a logically sufficient condition for this, mutually entails any other such set; (11) I deny that a dualist needs to provide an explanation of how the soul has the capacities that it has; and finally (12) I defend my view that souls have thisness, and claim that that is not a difficulty for the view that God determines which persons will exist.
  • Item
    Swinburne’s Are We Bodies or Souls?
    (Towarzystwo Naukowe KUL, Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski Jana Pawła II, 2021-03-19) Hasker, William
    Richard Swinburne’s Are We Bodies or Souls? presents a sustained case for a view concerning the nature of persons that can be classified as a form of either Cartesian dualism or emergent dualism. This paper comments on two important arguments developed in the book and concludes by considering the problem of the origin of souls.
  • Item
    Swinburne’s Hyper-Cartesian Dualism
    (Towarzystwo Naukowe KUL, Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski Jana Pawła II, 2021-03-19) Cottingham, John
    This paper maintains that Swinburne’s argument that the body is not essential to who I am is vulnerable to a similar objection to that put forward by Arnauld against Descartes: how do I know that my self-identification furnishes a complete and adequate account of the essential “me,” sufficient to show I could really continue to exist even were the body to be destroyed? The paper goes on to criticize Swinburne’s “hyper-Cartesian” position, that we are simply “souls who control bodies,” and thus only contingently human. This denial of our essential humanity compares unfavourably with Descartes’s own more intuitively attractive view that the human being is a genuine entity in its own right.
  • Item
    Swinburne on Physicalism and Personal Identity
    (Towarzystwo Naukowe KUL, Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski Jana Pawła II, 2021-03-19) Snowdon, Paul
    In chapter 2 Swinburne rejects physicalism for two reason. The first is that it is committed to entailments that do not exist. It is suggested that this reason is questionable both because there is no persuasive reason to deny there are such entailments, and also no reason to think that physicalism has such entailments. The second reason is that the mental involves privileged access by the subject and physical features do not allow privileged access. It is proposed that the physical does in fact permit privileged access. In chapter 3 Swinburne defends the Simple View of personal identity. The reasoning is very complex and rich, but it is proposed that Swinburne has not really shown that a reductionist account cannot be correct.
  • Item
    The Revival of Substance Dualism
    (Towarzystwo Naukowe KUL, Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski Jana Pawła II, 2021-03-19) Robinson, Howard
    I argue in this essay that Richard Swinburne’s revised version of Descartes’ argument in chapter 5 of his Are We Bodies or Souls? does not quite get him to the conclusion that he requires, but that a modified version of his treatment of personal identity will do the trick. I will also look critically at his argument against epiphenomenalism, where, once again, I share his conclusion but have reservations about the argument.
  • Item
    Not Just a Terminological Difference: Cartesian Substance Dualism vs Thomistic Hylomorphism
    (Towarzystwo Naukowe KUL, Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski Jana Pawła II, 2021-03-19) Skrzypek, Jeremy W.
    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.
  • Item
    Descartes, Kant, and Swinburne on Human Soul
    (Towarzystwo Naukowe KUL, Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski Jana Pawła II, 2021-03-19) Judycki, Stanisław
    This paper addresses two issues in Richard Swinburne’s book Are We Bodies or Souls? I interpret Swinburne’s modal argument as an example of a priori synthetic knowledge. Swinburne’s thesis that every person possesses “thisness” is compared with Kant’s distinction between the empirical character and the intelligible character.