Swinburne’s Hyper-Cartesian Dualism

• Authors: John Cottingham

Title variants

PL

Swinburne’s Hyper-Cartesian Dualism

• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

PL

This paper maintains that Swinburne’s argument that the body is not essential to who I am is vulnerable to a similar objection to that put forward by Arnauld against Descartes: how do I know that my self-identification furnishes a complete and adequate account of the essential “me,” sufficient to show I could really continue to exist even were the body to be destroyed? The paper goes on to criticize Swinburne’s “hyper-Cartesian” position, that we are simply “souls who control bodies,” and thus only contingently human. This denial of our essential humanity compares unfavorably with Descartes’s own more intuitively attractive view that the human being is a genuine entity in its own right.

Keywords

EN

dualism; Descartes; human being; soul; hyper-Cartesian; embodiment

• Publisher: Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski Jana Pawła II. Towarzystwo Naukowe KUL
• Journal: Roczniki Filozoficzne
• Year: 2021
• Volume: 69
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 23-31

Dates

published

2021-03-18

Contributors

author

John Cottingham

• Emeritus Professor at the University of Reading

• https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5205-0323

References

• Descartes, René. Oeuvres de Descartes. 12 vols. Edited by Charles Adam and Paul Tannery. Paris: Vrin/CNRS, 1964–1976.
• Descartes, René. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. Edited and translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch. Vols. 1–2. Cambridge: CUP, 1985.
• Descartes, René. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. Edited and translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny. Vol. 3. Cambridge: CUP, 1991.
• Evans, Gareth. Varieties of Reference. Edited by John McDowell. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982.
• Swinburne, Richard. Are We Bodies or Souls? Oxford: OUP, 2019.

Identifiers

DOI

10.18290/rf21691-3