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Articles

Swinburne’s Separations

Sally Latham on Swinburne’s argument that you can exist without your body.

Oxford Emeritus Professor of Philosophy Richard Swinburne says that when he began his academic career in the 1970s, about 1% of philosophers were dualists – believing that the mind and the brain are different things – but now this has grown to a whopping 2%. In an age of neuroscience and materialism, dualism is an unpopular theory in philosophical circles, often seen as a relic of the age of Descartes (the Seventeenth Century), before we knew much about brains. Swinburne aims to champion this underdog with his most recent (rather complicated) defence of ‘substance dualism’ – the claim that the mind is a distinct entity that can exist independently of the brain; something non-physical that constitutes ‘me’. He uses some classic thought experiments about brain-splitting, along with some abstract logical principles, to show how certain scenarios we can see to be logically and metaphysically possible can only be so if we assume his type of dualism to be true.

Although it may not seem so, the following is a simplified and stripped-back version of Swinburne’s arguments, and for the full impact one should read his Mind, Brain, and Free Will, published in 2013.

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