Swinburne on Physicalism and Personal Identity

• Authors: Paul Snowdon

Title variants

PL

Swinburne on Physicalism and Personal Identity

• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

PL

In chapter 2 Swinburne rejects physicalism for two reason. The first is that it is committed to entailments that do not exist. It is suggested that this reason is questionable both because there is no persuasive reason to deny there are such entailments, and also no reason to think that physicalism has such entailments. The second reason is that the mental involves privileged access by the subject and physical features do not allow privileged access. It is proposed that the physical does in fact permit privileged access. In chapter 3 Swinburne defends the Simple View of personal identity. The reasoning is very complex and rich, but it is proposed that Swinburne has not really shown that a reductionist account cannot be correct.

Keywords

EN

Swinburne; physicalism; entailments; privileged access; personal identity; Simple View; Reductionist View

• Publisher: Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski Jana Pawła II. Towarzystwo Naukowe KUL
• Journal: Roczniki Filozoficzne
• Year: 2021
• Volume: 69
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 11-21

Dates

published

2021-03-18

Contributors

author

Paul Snowdon

• Emeritus Professor at University College London, UK

• https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0057-7849

References

• Snowdon, Paul F. “On Formulating Materialism and Dualism.” In Cause, Mind, and Reality, edited by John Heil, 137–58. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1989.
• Snowdon, Paul F. “Philosophy and the Mind/Body Problem.” In Mind, Self and Person, edited by Anthony O’Hear, 21–38. Cambridge: CUP, 2015.
• Swinburne, Richard. Are We Bodies or Souls? Oxford: OUP, 2019.

Identifiers

DOI

10.18290/rf21691-2