Cartesian substance dualism

Una fortunata rappresentazione storiografica ha voluto che il dualismo di Descartes si costituisse in diretta rottura col concetto tommasiano di anima-forma. Sulla scia dei numerosi studi che negli ultimi decenni si sono opposti a questo pregiudizio, L'angelo e la macchina ricostruisce nel dettaglio il dibattito cinque-seicentesco sulla psicologia, focalizzandosi specialmente sull'ambiente gesuita e sul contesto aristotelico, platonico e agostiniano di area francese. A partire da una rigorosa indagine sulle teorie dell'anima separata, particolare attenzione è data poi alla derivazione indirettamente angelologica del cogito e dell'innatismo cartesiano. Negli anni in cui Descartes elabora la sua metafisica, infatti, l'immediata prossimità tra anime e angeli costituisce per certi versi un dato di fatto, alla luce del quale appaiono chiare molte scelte argomentative delle Meditationes e persino le dinamiche che congiungono strettamente la "sostanza pensante" con il corpo-macchina.

— Review: Dr. Nicolò Galasso, in La Cultura. Rivista di Filosofia, Letteratura e Storia, 57 (2019, 1), pp. 129-132.
— Review: Dr. Jacopo Francesco Falà, in Lo Sguardo. Rivista di Filosofia, 27 (2018, 2), pp. 369-373.
— Review: Dr. Laurence Dupas-Gelin, in Bulettin Cartésien (Archives de Philosophie), 49 (2020), pp. 196-197.
— Review: Emanuele Landi, in Biblos. Revista da Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Coimbra (forthcoming).

Modern science has been plagued by a dualistic view of nature for some time. This duality could be called the Cartesian Paradox because its origin dates back to the work of René Descartes during the Scientific Revolution and his separation of the world of nature into two parts, mind and matter. This dualism was necessary at the time for the development as well as the later evolution of science, but has become far too limiting in modern science. Science has now come to a crossroad where it must solve the Cartesian Paradox and this dualistic approach to understanding nature or retreat in its path of progress. However, in most cases this dualism has been grossly overlooked and even rejected as real by modern science because it is so fundamental and deeply embedded in the human and scientific psyches that it is easily overlooked as a problem.

The purpose of my research essay is to assess the most prominent forms of dualism and find out which theory is the most satisfactory theory dualism. I will not be arguing for dualism over any type of physicalism, my paper will be more of a building block for future arguments against physicalism. I begin my paper by explaining the three criteria I use to evaluate each theory, as well as why I have chosen these three criteria. The criteria I use are substance distinction, causal interaction, and moral responsibility. I explain each of the dualistic theories these being; property dualism, epiphenomenalism, and substance dualism. I evaluate each against my criteria, showing the faults that property dualism and epiphenomenalism have in satisfying the criteria. I conclude my essay by arguing that substance dualism is the most satisfying form of dualism, as it accounts for each of the three criteria.

This book is about the identity theory in contemporary philosophy of mind containing a long essay of mine and the italian translations of some remarkable contributions by Place. Armstrong, Smart, Lewis, McGinn, Jackson. The book has been published by Le Monnier, Firenze, 2005.

My analysis straddles Descartes' metaphysics and some parts of contemporary philosophy, especially regarding consciousness, and aims to show that once our understanding is freed from philosophical habits that affect current debates, Descartes' views offer an opportunity to draw important insights. Primarily, I examine Descartes' mind-body dualism and contrast it with behaviourism, particularly with philosophical behaviourism, focusing on Gilbert Ryle's dispositional behaviourism and his attacks on Descartes' dualism. The discussion takes the form of Objections and Replies, presenting the two thinkers in some sort of dialogue with one another. This bring out clearly who is distorting our ordinary language, violating the logical geography of concepts, committing a category mistake, and systematically misleading us. Ryle's two well-known accusations-the category mistake, and the dogma of the ghost in the machine-are turned, by a reductio ad absurdum, against his own commitments, leading to an evaluation of his highly paradoxical view, and showing how it collapses in on itself. The closing parts touch upon, but do not pursue, some fundamental concerns about personhood and the self, the metaphysics of mind, freedom, and moral significance, and raise the question of what our deepest concerns and responsibility in the twenty-first century must be.

The relationship between self-consciousness, Aristotelian ontology, and Cartesian duality is far closer than it has been thought to be.  There is no valid inference either from considerations of Aristotle’s hylomorphism or from the phenomenological distinction between body and living body, to the undermining of Cartesian dualism.  The claims that Descartes introspectively encounters the self and that the Cartesian extent of inner space is self-contained are profound errors, distortions through the lenses of modern theories.  Descartes’ conception of the self as both a reasoning and willing being informs his conception of personhood; a person for Descartes is an unanalysable, integrated, self-conscious, and autonomous human being.

In this essay, I argue that a proper understanding of the Cartesian proof of the external world sheds light on some vexatious questions concerning his theory of sense perception. Three main points emerge from the discussion: a picture of the mind, conceived as the power of understanding, as essentially related to the physical world; an extension of rationality such that it includes a set of necessities that neither can be deduced from the principles furnished by pure understanding alone nor are to be found among the particular items of sense experience; and a conception of human sense perception as a composite power that includes sensory awareness as well as understanding, and so that establishes a sharp distinction between human and animal sensory awareness. As far as agency is a constitutive ingredient of human sense perception, Descartes’ doctrine is in line with some current versions of a virtue epistemology.

A collection of fifty essays on Descartes and his influence in the seventeenth century. The first section is devoted to various aspects of Descartes’s philosophy (biography, epistemology, metaphysics, natural philosophy (science), mathematics, philosophical theology, etc.). The second section is devoted to Descartes’s influence, especially Cartesians and the Cartesian movement, in France, the Netherlands, Italy, England and elsewhere. The third section is devoted to the critics and opponents of Descartes and Cartesianism.

Are near-death experiences (NDEs) just elaborate hallucinations produced by a dying brain? Or the exuberant fantasies of attention-seeking narcissists? As the accounts in this book abundantly demonstrate: Neither!

This book contains over 100 reliable, often firsthand accounts of perceptions during NDEs that were later verified as accurate by independent sources. These near-death experiencers were everyday people from all over the world—many of whom were clinically dead, unable to see or hear, and yet able to perceive new vistas of a world beyond the senses and even beyond death.

The Self Does Not Die is a trailblazing effort to present the most confirmed cases of consciousness beyond death ever compiled. - (There now is a paperback and a kindle version.)

Psychological Behaviorism is committed to classifying and understanding behaviors in a way that “can be described and explained without making ultimate reference to mental events or to internal psychological processes” meaning that “the sources of [said] behavior[s] are external (in the environment), not internal (in the mind, in the head)” (Graham, SEP Fall 2010). In this paper, I will present B. F. Skinner’s explanation regarding an exemplary case of a plausible human action, specifically that a subject, named Sam, while walking through a museum, pauses before Johannes Vermeer’s “Reading a Letter” and says “exquisite”. I will then present how Noam Chomsky would criticize the psychological behaviorist account that B. F. Skinner presents and defends, given the same exemplary case of a plausible human action. I hope to clarify the usage of Psychological Behaviorism as B. F. Skinner suggests and to present the criticism of Psychological Behaviorism as presented by Noam Chomsky.

Relazione presentata, su invito di Carlo Borghero, al Workshop Filosofia, scienze, erudizione nel Sei-Settecento. Bilanci e prospettive di ricerca (Villa Mirafiori, 26-28 gennaio 2016), nell’ambito del Prin 2010-2011: Atlante della ragione europea (XV-XVIII secolo).

Paris, Garnier Flammarion. Sortie en librairie le 29 août 2018.

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    TABLE
Avertissement ............................................................ 7
Présentation .............................................................. 9
L’HOMME
Préface ...................................................................... 71
Extrait du privilège du roi........................................ 123
L’Homme de René Descartes................................... 125
La Description du corps humain ............................. 227
Remarques de Louis de La Forge ............................ 289
Préface de M. Schuyl ............................................... 489
Chronologie............................................................... 525
Bibliographie sélective commentée............................. 531 Table......................................................................... 535

No d’édition : L.01EHPN000126.N001 Dépôt légal : août 2018

My analysis straddles Descartes' metaphysics and some parts of contemporary philosophy, especially regarding consciousness, and aims to show that once our understanding is freed from philosophical habits that affect current debates, Descartes' views offer an opportunity to draw important insights. Primarily, I examine Descartes' mind-body dualism and contrast it with behaviourism, particularly with philosophical behaviourism, focusing on Gilbert Ryle's dispositional behaviourism and his attacks on Descartes' dualism. The discussion takes the form of Objections and Replies, presenting the two thinkers in some sort of dialogue with one another. This bring out clearly who is distorting our ordinary language, violating the logical geography of concepts, committing a category mistake, and systematically misleading us. Ryle's two well-known accusationsthe category mistake, and the dogma of the ghost in the machineare turned, by a reductio ad absurdum, against his own commitments, leading to an evaluation of his highly paradoxical view, and showing how it collapses in on itself. The closing parts touch upon, but do not pursue, some fundamental concerns about personhood and the self, the metaphysics of mind, freedom, and moral significance, and raise the question of what our deepest concerns and responsibility in the twenty-first century must be.

In this paper, I inspect the grounds for the mature Spinozist argument for substance monism. The argument is succinctly stated at Ethics Part 1, Proposition 14. The argument appeals to two explicit premises: (1) that there must be a substance with all attributes; (2) that substances cannot share their attributes. In conjunction with a third implicit premise, that a substance cannot not have any attribute whatsoever, Spinoza infers that there can be no more than one substance. I begin the inspection with the analysis of the first premise, which is provided in the form of the four proofs of God’s existence in Ethics Part 1, Proposition 11. While demonstrating how Spinoza adopts a progressive approach, where the fourth proof of God’s existence is more successful and persuasive than the third, which is more successful than the second, etc., I also unpack concepts central to Spinoza’s thinking here, including the concepts of reason (ratio) and power (potesta or potentia). I then analyze the second premise of the Spinozist argument for substance monism, as established by Ethics Part 1, Proposition 4 in conjunction with Ethics Part 1, Proposition 5. I take up and respond to the objection attributed to Leibniz that a substance p can have the attributes x and y and a substance q can have the attributes y and z, and thus that substances can share some attributes while remaining distinct. Throughout the study, my attention is focused on the argumentative procedures Spinoza adopts. This yields a close, internalist reading of the text where Spinoza effectively embraces substance monism. In conclusion to this study, I underscore to the originality of Spinoza’s argument for seventeenth century theories of substance.

Keywords: Spinoza; substance monism; proofs of God’s existence; individuation.

https://revistas.ufrj.br/index.php/seiscentos/issue/view/1813

Thomas Nagel in ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ suggests that we don’t yet have much idea of how mental entities could be identical with physical ones (though he wisely stops short of accusing physicalists of not meaning ANYTHING WHATSOEVER by their identity-claims).  Colin McGinn goes further by suggesting that we may forever remain in this state of ignorance and incomprehension because of the inherent limitations of the human intellect.  I argue that the mere possibility that McGinn is right shows that it is over-hasty to conclude from philosophy’s failure to solve its problems that there must be something wrong with the problems themselves.  I also try to relate Nagel’s and McGinn’s view to David Stove’s response to philosophy’s apparent failure to make much progress.  He seems pessimistic about whether we will ever fully understand what is wrong with some philosophical claims.

Typically, Christian theology includes an understanding of human afterlife consisting of two stages. The first is a disembodied existence as an immaterial being in the time between death and resurrection. Normally, it's affirmed that some disembodied humans go to Heaven/Paradise between one's death and resurrection; this is a state I call The Intermediate State. The second stage is the bodily resurrection. In this paper, I focus on The Intermediate State. Though the majority of the Christian tradition affirms it, I think it's mistaken. To show two reasons why, I argue that a traditional metaphysics of human persons deployed to explicate The Intermediate State brings with it one or the other of at least two untoward consequences for Christian theology.

In Galileo's Error, Philip Goff sets out a manifesto for a post-Galilean science of consciousness. Article four of the manifesto reads: 'Anti-Dualism: Consciousness is not separate from the physical world; rather consciousness is located in the intrinsic nature of the physical world.' I argue that there is an important sense of ‘dualism’ in which Goff’s arguments are not only compatible with but entail dualism, and not only dualism but substance dualism. Substance dualism, in the sense I have in mind, is the view that (i) there are two sides to reality, a fundamentally mental side and a fundamentally nonmental side; and (ii) the fundamentally mental side consists of mental substances resembling Cartesian souls. I do not suggest that this is bad news for post-Galilean science of consciousness. My aim is rather to push for a certain view about what a theory of consciousness motivated by Goff’s arguments must look like.

Abstract: The cognitive science of religion has contributed greatly to our understanding the cognitive processes involved in religious beliefs and practices. The author warns, however, that current research trends and theories in the cognitive science of religion threatens the relevancy of this project. By misapplying the psychological and philosophical theories of mind and mind-body dualism to supernatural agents, these cognitive theories are positing supernatural agents that are not representative of anthropologically documented instances. The author traces the historical patterns and logical errors that have contributed to this trend, and then demonstrates how these patterns and logical errors are present in the literature. Finally, the author suggests why cognitive scientists of religion have fallen prey to these errors and ways to rectify them.

Andrei Tarkovsky's film Solaris (1972) is studied through the lens of philosophy of mind.  The question of memory and personhood, as developed by John Locke and then expanded by Derek Parfit, is applied to the status of Hari — the copy of the protagonist's deceased wife.  The key question addressed by this paper is on what basis Hari can (or should?) be considered human.  Hari's personhood is further analyzed in the context of Cartesian dualism, the response to Descartes by reductionism and the rebuttal of reductionism by the functionalist theories of Hilary Putnam.  Descartes' thoughts on animal suffering and the bête-machine are pitted against Hari's experience in Solaris. The key question is whether Hari can be reduced to her alien structure or should be considered in terms of her behavior.  The moral implications of these questions are extended to human sociality, human emotional response and the role of the body in the human condition.

In this paper I will expose the contents of the Compendium musicae in the light of the Cartesian philosophy. Firstly, I try to comprehend the text as a theory of music based on the nature of sound. To that end, it is important to show the features of the Cartesian philosophy that are already present in the text, such as deductibility, mathematization and mechanism. Secondly, I also try to show the presence of a philosophical problem widely discussed in other parts of Descartes´s work, namely, that of dualism and communicability of substances. In this regard I want to point out that the
relation between thought and extension appears in the Compendium as the
confession of a supposition. In order to comprehend the sense of this confession I offer an analysis of this text in the light of Descartes’s work. Finally, I propose an alternative interpretation of Cartesian dualism and of the role of musical theory in Cartesian philosophy.

I offer a thought experiment to support the claim that some thoughts of deceased persons which are non-miraculously present in the minds of the living are disembodied soul parts of the deceased. I show that these soul parts are disembodied bearers of nonphysical dispositional properties but no ghosts – i.e. they are disembodied without personhood. Disembodiment without personhood shows that disembodiment is too broad a concept to underpin arguments for dualism and the immortality of the soul. Arguments from the metaphysical possibility of disembodiment in favour of Cartesian dualism are destined to fail. If my argument is correct, then it might be the case that I have to have a body in order to be a person.

Un mondo fatto di bit? di Diego MARCONI 19 RedPill® di Elena CASETTA e Achille C. VARZI 29 Quale epistemologia in Matrix? di Nicla VASSALLO 37 Matrix e la Mozione degli Affetti di Maurizio FERRARIS 55 SECONDA PARTE -IL SOGNO DI MORPHEUS Mentale, corporeo, spirituale 73 Matrix: dalla mente estesa ai cervelli bionici di Alberto OLIVERIO 75 La coscienza nella Matrice di Alfredo PATERNOSTER 85 Matrici senza uscita. Circolarità della conoscenza oggettiva e prospettiva buddhista di Franco BERTOSSA -Roberto FERRARI -Marco BESA 107 Realtà virtuale e mondo mentale di Giulio Cesare GIACOBBE 129 La Bibbia e la Matrice di Claudio CONSONNI 143 TERZA PARTE -ANTROPOLOGIA DELL'ELETTO Umano, macchinico, post-umano 151 L'imperialismo del codice di Giuseppe O. LONGO 153 Ontologia dell'individuo. La clonazione come costruzione scientifica e sociale dell'essere umano di Carlo Alberto REDI 173 Disumanizzazione o postumanesimo: il dilemma di Matrix di Gaspare POLIZZI 185 L'incubo di Wiener e la riscossa del soggetto di Antonio CARONIA 205 QUARTA PARTE -VISIONI DALLA CITTÀ DELLE MACCHINE Virtualità, esperienza, comunicazione 213 La sfida filosofica della realtà virtuale e l'avvento dell'era della tecnica di Paolo D'ALESSANDRO 215 L'Architetto e gli untori di Antonio TURSI 227 La penultima verità di Carlo FORMENTI 241 I dati dell'esperienza e il mito del mondo esterno di Carlo SINI 249 RINGRAZIAMENTI E NOTE SUGLI AUTORI 257 DIEGO MARCONI UN MONDO FATTO DI BIT?* 1

Panpsychism, the view that phenomenal perception is a fundamental property of the universe, is one of the oldest theories in philosophy of mind. While it may seem counter-intuitive at first glance, panpsychism deftly avoids many of the glaring problems in the various forms of dualism and materialism. The central challenge to panpsychism is the combination problem: How to integrate fundamental units of conscious experience, which is usually considered an indivisible property, into one larger individual subject; in other words, how to form a macro-subject from micro-subjects. Several authors consider the combination problem to be insurmountable, and to require a retreat from a strong panphsychist view to a neutral monism. I argue that a reappraisal of the work of Leibniz in this area gives an informative perspective on this problem, and moves us further toward its dissolution.

This book is an introduction in a double sense. It is intended to introduce beginners in philosophy to the idea of philosophical nonsense and the problems it raises. But it is also addressed to professional philosophers, most of whom seem virtually unaware of the issue.

Certain philosophers, here called ‘nonsensicalists’, believe that much philosophy (philosophical questions as well as assertions) is simply nonsense in the strict sense of being meaningless. They proceed as though it were an established fact that there is such a thing as philosophical nonsense and the notion were quite unproblematic. By contrast, many other philosophers proceed as though either they had never heard of it or it were quite obvious that there is no such thing.

There can be little doubt that what the nonsensicalists are saying is of great importance – if they are right. But there are at least eight questions that must be addressed before anyone is in a position to start hunting down philosophical nonsense and they have all been woefully neglected.

The idea of philosophical nonsense goes back to Thomas Hobbes at least and yet its history remains largely unresearched.

In view of the neglect of the problems raised by the notion of philosophical nonsense, even by professional philosophers, it is not unduly optimistic to suggest that it is a topic to which relative newcomers to the subject might make a contribution.

Ludwig Wittgenstein thought that good philosophy unties the knots in our thinking that bad philosophy has put there and must make movements as complicated as the knots it unties. Is the notion of philosophical nonsense an essential aid to this – as Wittgenstein himself thought – or just another knot?

The article examines monism as an actual, but not the only possible paradigm of scientific research. The question is investigated why this paradigm as the concept of the One practically supplanted the reflection about the Different both in science and in the public consciousness of the European person. It is shown that the concept of the One became the starting point of both many world religions and European philosophy. The idea is discussed that the development of science has occurred so far as the deployment of the problem of the Unified, scientific generalization and the formation of a holistic view of the world. But at the same time, even in ancient Greek philosophy, there was also a reflection about the Different, which was not in demand until modern times. However, in modern times, dualism again does not receive sufficient reinforcement, and Spinoza’s monistic concept becomes the main doctrine of research to this day. At the same time, the need for progress in
the sciences of human nature is likely to require a revision of the main paradigm towards taking into account the advantages of dualistic and pluralistic models.

The problem of divine agency and action is analogous to the problem of human agency and action: How is such agency possible in the absence of a dualistic causal interaction between disparate orders of being? This paper explores nondualistic accounts of divine agency that assert the following: (1) physical monism, (2) antireductionism, (3) physical realization, and (4) divine causal realism. I conclude that a robustly causal deity is incompatible with nonddualism's affirmation of physical monism. Specifically, I argue the incoherence of nondualistic strategies that advocate divine information transfer without energy transfer or the divine downward causation of physical events. Furthermore, I claim that the principle of explanatory exclusion makes any nondualistic, noninterventionist account of divine agency highly dubious. Finally, I suggest that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam can avoid a causally inert deity only if they are willing to deny the current presumption of the causal closure of the physical.

According to a traditional Christian doctrine, the soul of the person continues to exist in a disembodied state between bodily death and bodily resurrection. This doctrine places theoretical constraints on a Christian metaphysics of the human person (the nature of her body and her soul). In this paper, I consider seven different philosophical anthropologies and try to adjudicate which one is the more suited to account for the doctrine of the Intermediate State. I argue that a kind of "Compound Dualism" is the best candidate.

The theoretical and moral bedrock of Western colonialism has been its claim to “universalism.” Central to this universalism is a Cartesian dualism in which only the disembodied mind has access to the universal, and the body, as a mere particular, does not. This paper (Part 1) and the following paper (Part 2) propose an alternative model of “universalism” as the totality of interactions between embodied particulars. This model of “universalism” is based on the relationship between the classical Chinese philosophical concepts of “feeling” (qing, 情), interaction (gan, 感), and the unimpeded free-flow (tong, 通) that results. This Chinese model of universalism is ultimately based on the organicist metaphysics of life that understands meaning and order to be the result of organic interaction between bodies. This paper will show how the dominant Chinese tradition understood the universal as a result of the sympathetic interaction between embodied particulars.

The aim of the paper is to present the main conceptions in the contemporary philosophy of mental (mind). The debate is narrated in two ways: The first approach concerns the ontology of mental, with the questions such as: What is the nature of mental?; What is the relation between mental and body?; Is the mental  reducible to its physical basis? The second approach has an epistemological character where especially the problem of self-knowledge in the frame of the discussion between
externalism and internalism is pointed out. The last part of the article gives an evaluation of the actual situation in the philosophy of mind which on the one hand tries to evolve in the direction of cognitive science but on the other hand stays in the frame of the traditional philosophy. The reason of it is the nature of the questions, which cannot be answered only by means of scientific disciplines.
It means that in contrast to the cognitive science the philosophical account of the mind-body problem is the preferred one.


Keywords
Philosophy of mental, (mind), mind-body problem, externalism, internalism, cognitive sciences

В статье рассматривается аргумент случайности против физикализма. Изучается проблема статуса свободы человеческих решений при возникновении и последующем анализе трагедии. Приводится аргументация в пользу того соображения, что в монистическом мире трагедия оказывается зациклена сама на себе, и истинная свобода в нем может быть только тождественна случайности, так как в противном случае «свободное» решение оказывается подчинено тем или иным причинам, а значит, не может иметь статус свободного. Показано, что критика дуализма Декарта со стороны Спинозы нацелена не на сам дуализм, а на идею разделения мира на протяженную и мыслящую субстанции. При этом идея дуализма, которая возникает у Декарта органически из-за применения его метода сомнения и рассуждения о совершенном и несовершенном, также незаслуженно отвергается. В статье проводится различие между идеей дуализма вообще и разделением мира на протяженную и мыслящую субстанции. Делается вывод, что исходная идея дуализма может реализоваться не только в картезианской онтологии, но и в версии нейтрального дуализма, где несовершенство, то есть свобода или случайность, имеет место не как отдельная субстанция, а как следствие и пространство взаимодействия независимых нейтральных субстанций. Это подтверждается также отдельными положениями философии прагматизма.

“Descartes’ Philosophical Physiology”. There is something strange about the way we see Descartes’ doctrine. We know, on the one hand, that it is a dualism and, on the other, that it is a mechanicism. However, we seldom consider the fact that this combination is at odds with our current philosophical mores. The contemporary dualist is usually an anti-mechanicist and the contemporary mechanicist is usually an anti-dualist. This paper offers a revision of Descartes’ main works in an attempt to render intelligible to contemporary readers a doctrinal combination the shocking nature of which we do not perceive for the sole fact that we tend to maintain its diverse parts in separate compartments. The proposed revision by the way shows us that Descartes is a much more interesting and rich author than what ordinary clichés let us perceive. Thus for example, a serious consideration of Descartes’ attempt to build a physics and a physiology would lead us to recognize that his metaphysical concerns, against ordinary opinion, are far from being the center of his work.

Various scholars in Kant studies (e.g., Watkins, Chignell, Ameriks) seem to agree that Kant is a dualist of one sort or another. For example, his commitment to transcendental rationalism, to the phenomenal/noumenal distinction of the theoretical philosophy, and to the human disposition of his moral and religious philosophy makes materialism of any kind a hard sell in Kant interpretation. What kind of dualist Kant must be is more difficult to determine and garners much less agreement. In three stages, this paper seeks to argue for a particular body- soul dualism that is entailed by Kant’s philosophy. First, by addressing how Kant is not a materialist. Second, the establishment of Kant’s epistemic grounds for dualism. Third, the rational dimension and existential significance of faith that will account for the specific way Kant’s dualism unfolds in the critical philosophy.

In the standard thought experiments, dualism strikes many philosophers as true, including many non-dualists. This ‘striking’ generates prima facie justification: in the absence of defeaters, we ought to believe that things are as they seem to be, i.e. we ought to be dualists. In this paper, I examine several proposed undercutting defeaters for our dualist intuitions. I argue that each proposal fails, since each rests on a false assumption, or requires empirical evidence that it lacks, or overgenerates defeaters. By the end, our prima facie justification for dualism remains undefeated. I close with one objection concerning the dialectical role of rebutting defeaters, and I argue that the prospects for a successful rebutting defeater for our dualist intuitions are dim. Since dualism emerges undefeated, we ought to believe it.

The Twin Earth scenario assumes reference to natural kinds is unique and never changes (rigid designation), and that we can give justice to the intuition of reference-permanence and things having a deep structure only by pushing meaning outside the brain or mind (semantic externalism). This, I'll show, doesn't follow. Besides, the intuition itself is misconstrued here. To say the term “water” expressed a thought or concept or belief denoting H2O before its actual discovery around 1750, is to make a claim without real content and be guilty of after-the-fact rationalizing. If anything, Twin Earth undercuts the theory of semantic externalism and its core-notion of rigid designation. A pluralized, descriptivist model of reference, I claim, is a better fit for our scientific data and ordinary intuitions either way.

In this paper I argue that understanding John Locke’s account of personal identity in the context of the metaphysical and religious debates of his day, especially the debates concerning the possibility of the afterlife and the resurrection, reveals the strengths of his theory. I follow Locke in classifying the views of his predecessors into material, Cartesian and non-Cartesian immaterial views of the soul, and views, according to which human beings are mind-body unions. I identify metaphysical problems for each view respectively and argue that the strength of Locke’s account of personal identity is not only that it provides a response to the various problems that arise for the views of his predecessors, but also that he offers a theory that does not require him to prove their views to be mistaken and is thereby consistent with their mutually exclusive views.