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The Souls of Beasts and Men

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

William Hasker
William Hasker
Affiliation:
Visiting Professor of Philosophy, Earlham College, Indiana
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Extract

‘The organic body signifies the latent crisis of every known ontology and the touchstone of “any future one which will be able to come forward as a science.”’ —Hans Jonas

‘Thales…said that the magnet has a soul in it because it moves the iron.’—Aristotle

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 10 , Issue 3 , September 1974 , pp. 265 - 277
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1974

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References

page 265 note 1 The Phenomenon of Life, New York: Harper & Row, 1966, p. 19.Google Scholar

page 265 note 2 On the Soul, I, 2.

page 266 note 1 Jonas, , op. cit., p. 20.Google Scholar

page 266 note 2 Discourse on Method, V.

page 266 note 3 The cruel treatment of their dogs by the monks at the Port-Royal monastery (good Cartesians and automatists all) became notorious. Even the saintly Malebranche was said to have kicked a pregnant dog and replied to a friend's remonstrances with the remark, ‘What, don't you know that that thing doesn't feel at all?’ (Rosenfield, Leonora Cohen, From Beast-Machine to Man-Machine: Animal Soul in French Letters from Descartes to La Mettrie, New York: Oxford University Press, 1941, p. 70.Google Scholar ) More significant, however, than such examples of mistreatment of animals based on their alleged insensibility, is the point that automatism, by depriving the creatures of subjectivity, also makes it impossible that they should be in any sense ends in-themselves. Thus the teleology of their existence, their raison d'être, could only lie in their usefulness to man. The fatefulness of this idea (which to be sure has other springs in addition to automatism) will scarcely be contested (cf. Jonas, , op. cit., p. 59.)Google Scholar

page 266 note 4 Or at least to all animals. See Descartes' ‘Letter to the Marquis of Newcastle’, in Rosenthal, David M., editor, Materialism and the Mind-Body Problem (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1971), P. 23.Google Scholar

page 267 note 1 If the modification (through mutation, etc.) of the physical organism is sufficient to produce a corresponding alteration in the soul, then the status of the latter as an independent substance is undermined—such a view has affinities with epiphenomenalism rather than with dualism. A dualist might prefer to assign to the soul a causative role in the physical transformation—but in order to transform its body, the soul must first of all transform itself, i.e. change its own nature, which surely raises puzzling questions. To attribute evolutionary change directly to divine fiat amounts to abandoning any attempt to understand evolution as a natural process—which hardly commends itself, once we admit that an evolutionary process did in fact occur.

page 267 note 2 See Haas, John W. Jr., ‘Biogenesis: A Renewed Interest in an Old Question’, Christian Scholar's Review, I, 4 (1971), pp. 291–305Google Scholar, for an argument that Christians ought not to discount this possibility out of hand.

page 267 note 3 Compare the following: ‘Synthesis strongly increases the evidence that the characteristics of the whole…are causally determined by the characteristics, including spatio-temporal arrangement, of its parts by showing that the object is produced, under controlled laboratory conditions, whenever parts with those characteristics are arranged in that way’. (Oppenheim, Paul and Putnam, Hilary, ‘Unity of Science as a Working Hypothesis’, in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 2, edited by Feigl, H., Scriven, M., and Maxwell, G., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1958, p. 15.)Google Scholar

page 268 note 1 Panpsychists sometimes support their position with an ‘analogical’ argument in which certain similarities between animate and inanimate beings are cited as empirical evidence for attributing awareness to the latter. But as Edwards points out, this argument lacks genuine empirical force, since dissimilarities are not allowed to count as evidence against panpsychism. See Edwards, Paul, ‘Panpsychism’, in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 6, p. 27 f.Google Scholar

page 269 note 1 This is emphatically not the argument ‘from physical indeterminacy to free will’, which has repeatedly been exposed as fallacious. But if there are other compelling reasons for asserting human freedom, and if in abandoning dualism we have also abandoned the presumption of a radical disjunction between the mental and the physical, then may we not reasonably conjecture that physical indeterminacy is the manifestation, at the basic level of nature, of that primal spontaneity which in its higher forms we designate as rational and moral freedom?

page 270 note 1 This requirement need not be satisfied in one holds, with John Hick among others, that life after death means ‘God's re-creation or reconstitution of the human psychophysical individual’, and that this ‘reconstitution’ does not involve the survival or persistence of any part of the person who has died. (See Hick, John, Philosophy of Religion, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1963, p. 51.Google Scholar) In this case, there would be no special problem about reconciling a mind-body theory with belief in life after death. In my opinion this position founders on the question of personal identity, but I cannot are this point here.

page 272 note 1 For instances of such speculations, see Paul Edwards, ‘Panpsychism.’

page 274 note 1 See Joseph Butler, ‘Of Personal Identity’, and Chisholm, Roderick M., ‘The Loose and Popular and Strict and Philosophical Senses of Identity’, in Perception and Personal Identity, ed. Care, N. S. and Grimm, R. H., Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1969.Google Scholar

page 274 note 2 Such an essay would also have to deal with the difficulties concerning the identity of disembodied persons which are discussed by Penelhum, Terence in his Survival and Disembodied Existence (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970).Google Scholar I am confident that these difficulties can be met, but this is not the place.

page 276 note 1 It should be further stipulated that the effect should be continuous and relatively dependable, rather than sporadic as telekinesis (if it exists at all) is assumed to be.

page 276 note 2 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigation, tr. Anscombe, 3rd Edition, New York: Macmillan, 1958, p. 56.Google Scholar Wittgenstein's point (or at least the point I am attributing to Wittgenstein) may be expressed more formally as follows: If C is a necessary condition for the correct application of concept P, then it follows that: Necessarily, if P is correctly applied, then C obtains. But it does not follow that: If P is correctly applied, C obtains necessarily

page 277 note 1 The Freedom of the Will, London: Adam and Charles Black, 1958, p. 103.Google Scholar

page 277 note 2 Ibid., p. 105.