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Body and Person

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

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The question of the relations between body and mind, the physical and the personal, this question is the strongest example one could cite of a philosophical question. If one wanted to teach someone just what the strange inquiry known as philosophy is, or has traditionally been thought to be, this, rather than the question about chairs and tables in untenanted rooms, would, I think, be the right question to choose, both for its richness and for its puzzling character. The puzzle about the relations between the mental, the personal, the spiritual, on the one hand, and the physical, the bodily, the material, on the other, is not (or doesn’t seem to be) a puzzle about what is in fact the case. It is not a question such as the question “What is the function of the pancreas?” might be. Even if we don’t know the answer to this question, we know the kind of observations that would be relevant to settling it. But if to the question “How are body and soul/mind/spirit/personality related?” we give the reply, “Look and see!” the point seems to have been missed. We have all the information we need in order to answer the question, surely; we know what it is to walk and run, to speak and sing, to add up a column of figures, to look out on the world and pick out the roses and the blackbirds, the sun and the moon and the constellations, to distinguish the smooth from the rough, the sphere from the cube, the animate from the inanimate, the past from the future; we can even, though this gets very difficult and our lives are filled with mistakes in this respect, distinguish friends from enemies, true lovers from false, the solidly good from the merely clever.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1978 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 Leo Tolstoy, Anna Kurenin, trans. Rosemary Edmonds (Penguin Books 1954, p.829

2 Descartes, Renee, Philosophical Writings, trans. and edited by Anscombe, Elizabeth and Geach, Peter Thomas (London 1954) pp. 279281Google Scholar

3 Of course, I leave out of account materialists‐Holbach, La Mettrie and such.

4 These are not proper names. We only call Fido “Fido” in view of our already knowing that “dog” applies to him.

5 Brown, Peter, AuguStine of Hippo (Berkeley 1967) p. 366Google Scholar

6 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, trans. be, G.E.M. Anscom (Oxford 1953)Google Scholar II iv p. 178e

7 For all I know, someone may already have written an article or a book claiming that the real meaning of the Resurrection is that it symbolises the proletarian revolution.

8 For an interesting discussion of modern exegetes' view of the Resurrection, see Michael Dummett, “Biblical Exegesis and the Resurrection”New Blackfriars 58 February 1977 pp. 56–72.

9 The New York Review of Books, 23 13 May 1976Google Scholar p. 26

10 Ibid. p. 27

11 Of course, there are philosophical arguments that claim to establish the soul's immortality. I am not here concerned with these.

12 Fletcher, Joseph, “Love is the Only Measure”,Commonweal, 83 14 Jan. 1966.Google Scholar

13 In what I have written, I am heavily dependent on the work of Professor P. T. Geach and the Rev. Herbert McCabe, O.P. If I had profited more from their writing, I should have avoided the many mistakes I have probably made.