Three Arguments for Dualism

A discussion by Jeremy Pierce.

Arguing for Dualism: The Identity Defense (Not to be Confused with the Twinkie Defense)

Bob Prokop wrote: Approximately one-twentieth of one percent of our bodies is replaced each day, through completely natural processes. At the end of 7 to 8 years, not a single atom remains in our physical selves that was there at the start of that period. Every particle of my today's physical self was either dirt, water, air, or another living organism 7 years ago. But I am demonstrably not a new person - I am the same Bob Prokop who was here eight, 10, or even 60 years ago, despite the fact that no trace of the original physical self remains. (I'd love to see someone try such a defense in court: "Your Honor, that wasn't me who committed that crime eight years ago. I wasn't even here. It was someone else with the same name!")

If that ain't proof of the existence of mind, or even of the soul, I don't know what is!

This is from an website entitled "Thought Experments on the Soul," by Kelley L. Ross.

If our concern then becomes personal identity, will the identity of material substance account for that? As I have argued, no. In physical terms alone, we know that there is a turnover of matter in our bodies. I believe that after 20 years or so, all the matter in our bodies is supposed to be different. A defendant in a legal case once even tried to argue that he was literally not the same person who had committed the crime, some twenty years plus in the past. His argument was not allowed as, indeed, we trace personal identity across that transformation. With the material objects, this can indeed produce some paradoxical results. The Stoics noticed that in their day the ship kept at Athens, which was supposed to have born Theseus to Crete, had finally been repaired so much that every single plank and other part of it was no longer original. Was it the "same" ship? In a way yes, and in a way no. One report is that this question was put to the Pythia at Delphi. With material objects, the less the original material, the less it is the original thing. There is no such ambiguity with people. And we can ask them.

Hylemorphic Dualism

An essay by David Oderberg.

From a Faith and Philosophy review of Soul, Body, and Survival: Essays on the Metaphysics of Human Persons ed. Kevin Corcoran

Jaegwon Kim’s essay “Lonely Souls: Causality and Substance Dualism” comes from a philosopher who operates out of the physicalist tradition. Unlike some in that tradition, however, he has been very serious about pressing difficulties for otherwise popular forms of physicalism in the area of mental causation. In this paper he presents some problems for dualism in the area of mental causation. He reconsiders the familiar objection to Descartes’ dualism that dualism is untenable because we cannot see how something nonphysical can interact with something physical. As Kim points out, this is often presented with no or almost no supporting argumentation. However, Kim does supply some argumentation to put some meat on the bones of the familiar objection, by generating what he calls the pairing problem.
Kim maintains that a spatial framework is necessary for the existence of a causal relationship amongst objects. If two rifles are fired and two people are killed, what criteria would lead us to correctly pair the causes and effects? The answer, says Kim, is the spatial relationships between deadly bullets and the victims. Kim also points out that lack of a spatial relation between a suspect and the victim is often sufficient to ground an alibi in a murder case. But since souls are not spatial, spatial pairing relationships between souls and matter cannot exist. Kim considers the possibility that souls have spatial locations, but he finds some difficulties with that idea as well, but he thinks this is problematic as well. We need to locate souls at a particular point in space, and claims that it would beg the question to locate the souls in the brain. Second, he argues that to locate souls in space would require that not more than one soul could occupy a location in space, that is, something like the impenetrability of matter would have to obtain. But he asks, if this is so, “why aren’t such souls just material objects, albeit of a very special, and strange kind?” And he thinks the soul found in a geometrical point could not have a structure capable of accounting for the rich mental life that humans have. Finally, he is suspicious of any solutions to the problem dictated by “dualist commitments.” He says “We shouldn’t do philosophy by first deciding what conclusions we want to prove, and then posit convenient entities and premises to get us where we want to go.”
First of all, it needs to be made clear just what it is for something to be a material thing. The book makes it evident that the concept of “materiality” and “matter” need to be made clearer than they are. This is especially imperative for Christians who want to go as far as possible in accommodating their faith to “materialism.” Orthodox materialism is a corollary of philosophical naturalism, and is typically committed to at least this: that the physical order is causally closed, and that whatever other states exist supervene on the physical; that is, there cannot be a difference without a physical difference. But what is more, physicalism is committed to the idea that the physical order is mechanistic, that is, purposive explanations cannot be basic-level explanations at the physical level. If the material is defined in this way, then it seems to me that something could have a spatial location, and it could also possess impenetrability, and still not be material in the orthodox sense. It could still be the case that the mental is sui generis and fundamental, and one of Foster’s dualist theses would still be true.

Mental Causation and the Case for Dualism

An interesting blog here.

Does I Cor 15 Undercut Mind-Body Dualism

This blogger thinks so.

Could I have been Obama? An argument against materialism

1. If everything is material, then all true statements about reality should follow necessarily from the set of true statements describing the physical world.


2. However, there are some statements about the world, such as “I am Dr. Reppert,” which do not follow necessarily from the set of physical world. There is a world physically identical to this one in which I am Barack Obama, not Dr. Reppert.

Therefore, not everything is material.

Stewart Goetz on Mind-Body Dualism

An answer given for Craig's Reasonable Faith site.