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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
What exactly are we conscious beings? Do we have immaterial souls, souls that are substances and can survive the destruction of our physical bodies? Richard Swinburne has recently given an affirmative answer to the latter question on the basis of a strikingly simple Cartesian argument. This paper shows why Swinburne’s argument ultimately fails, owing to an instructive dilemma concerning the logical possibility of conscious beings’ surviving bodily destruction. Perhaps we do have substantial immaterial souls, but Swinburne’s Cartesian argument, we shall see, does not cogently deliver the conclusion that we do.
1 ‘Personal Identity: The Dualist Theory,’ in Swinbume, Richard and Shoemaker, Sydney Personal Identity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1984) 29-31Google Scholar; see also his The Evolution of the Soul (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1986), ch. 8; and ‘The Structure of the Soul,’ in Peacocke, A. and Gillett, G. eds., Persons and Personality (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1987) 33-55Google Scholar.
2 See ‘Personal Identity,’ 30; The Evolution of the Soul, 154, 314-15; ‘The Structure of the Soul,’ 35, 47, 50.
3 We are grateful to Richard Swinbume, Alfred Mele, and referees for the Canadian Journal of Philosophy for helpful comments.