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Physicalism and Immortality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

David L. Mouton
David L. Mouton
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Northwestern University
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Extract

To many it seems obvious that any reduction of the nature of man to purely physical components involves an (at least) indirect attack on the doctrine of human immortality. To so reduce human nature, it may be argued, is to eliminate the soul and it is this essential component of man, rather than his body, which is the foundation of his immortality. This seems to me an altogether mistaken notion. My purpose in this paper, therefore, is to clarify the relation of physicalism and immortality and thereby to reveal the error in this alleged incompatibility.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , March 1972 , pp. 45 - 53
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1972

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References

page 47 note 1 Descartes, Rene, The Philosophical Works of Descartes, (eds.) Haldane, E. S. and Ross, G. R. T. (New York, 1955), Vol. I, p. 168.Google Scholar

page 47 note 2 This holds also for the Thomistic doctrine that man is a necessary being since on this view man still owes his existence and necessity to a source outside himself and he is capable of being annihilated. Cf. Brown, Patterson, ‘St Thomas' Doctrine of Necessary Being’, Philosophical Review, LXXIII (1964), 81.Google Scholar

page 48 note 1 Wiener, Norbert, The Human Use of Human Beings, Cybernetics and Society (Anchor Books, 1954), pp. 95–6.Google Scholar

page 51 note 1 For a presentation of problems connected with this notion, see Chisholm, Roderick, ‘Identity Through Possible Worlds: Some Questions’, Nous, I (1967).Google Scholar

page 52 note 1 With regard to bodies Richard Gale has argued in support of this thesis. Cf. ‘A Note on Personal Identity and Bodily Continuity’, Analysis, 29 (1969).Google Scholar

page 52 note 2 Note that uniqueness of a person from the first-person perspective does appear to be an essential property of the nature of the individual. Suppose, for example, that there were another individual exactly like me. Although others may regard us as identical in the sense of being perfectly inter-changeable, I have no choice but to regard the other as being other than myself however curiously like a mirror image of me he may be. If, for example, I were to pass up a pleasant experience and permit my copy to live through it, I will not have experienced it and I will be a different person from the one who did experience it. There is therefore an important distinction between personal uniqueness from the first-person perspective and that from a second- or third-person perspective and between their foundations in the nature of the individual and the nature of the world, respectively.