Are We Bodies or Souls?

In this rigorous and carefully argued book, Richard Swinburne defends the unfashionable position of substance dualism against physicalism, asking what makes us who we are as humans: 'as conscious rational agents, we are beings of a very different kind from inanimate physical substances.' What is at stake is the nature of personal identity, whether complex or simple, which Swinburne maintains constitutes the soul. However, the soul is postulated to come into existence around the seventh month of pregnancy and is sustained by the brain. The second comparative chapter gives some brilliant philosophical definitions of key terms including the sophisticated notion of supervenience frequently deployed by physicalists; the author distinguishes sharply between mental and physical properties, arguing for causal efficacy of mental events, including thoughts, beliefs, intentions and desires - he calls these 'propositional events' as they can be expressed in a sentence.

Amending Descartes, the author argues that it is logically possible that we can exist without a body or brain as an indivisible soul (p. 72). Here he runs into a perennial limitation in Western (non-esoteric) philosophy, namely the absence of any idea of a subtle body, hence the stark distinction between the physical body and a postulated bodiless state. His chapter on the interaction of souls and bodies makes no reference to the work of Popper and Eccles (Swedenborg also wrote about this from personal experience) where Eccles in particular proposed neural mechanisms for interaction. He has a useful discussion on the nature of belief, and his notion of testimonial belief in relation to the principle of credulity in the absence of counter-evidence is very serviceable. Rational testimonial belief relates particularly to reports of exceptional experiences that challenge the causal closure of the physical. The final chapter asks if science could explain souls, also when the soul ceases to exist. The author himself states that 'there is no reason to suppose that the human exists when the brain shows no evidence of (being conscious) - some of these arguments are elaborated with respect to cryonics.

I was quite taken aback to read that 'there would be such evidence for the continuing existence of a soul after death if it was a common occurrence for young children to apparently remember in much detail the life of some earlier person, now dead; and for those a-memories to be accurate memories of what that earlier person did and (as far as we can judge) experienced.' Swinburne makes no reference to, and is apparently unacquainted with, the massive database of exactly such cases accumulated at the University of Virginia by Ian Stevenson. He does refer to claims by Eastern religions, but as many readers will know, Stevenson's approach is rigorously empirical and does not easily draw the reincarnation conclusion. All this demonstrates the narrowness of the evidence base used in conventional philosophy and how their approach to memory and the brain might be enhanced by study not only of this material, but also of the very considerable literature pointing to survival of the personality, none of which is mentioned here either. (In recent times, the only really prominent philosophers to take survival evidence seriously were H.H. Price and C.D. Broad, both of whom were Presidents of the Society for Psychical Research. It would be interesting to see what the author would make of this evidence, although he would be going into risky territory as the topic is not academically respectable due to the limitations of the prevailing physicalist worldview that he criticises. However, this is an illuminating book as far as its argument goes.