Dusting Off Dualism?

Throughout the previous century dualism’s demise seemed imminent. During the 1970s Daniel Dennett (1978, p. 252) assessed the field of philosophy of mind and his evaluation of dualism was unflattering, to put it mildly:

Since it is widely granted these days that dualism is not a serious view to contend with, but rather a cliff over which to push one’s opponents, a capsule ‘refutation’ of dualism, to alert if not convince the uninitiated, is perhaps in order.

Two decades after Dennett’s assessment, John Haldane (1998, p. 257) highlighted an ironic shift in the field: “dualism has to be contended with.”

The two decades between the two assessments, Dennett’s and Haldane’s respectively, included the rising realization that consciousness is quite recalcitrant. Reducing consciousness to physics was made difficult by qualia and multiple realizability. To be sure, the recalcitrance of consciousness has not led to a resurgence of dualism, but rather a reconsideration. (Timothy O’Conner and David Robb (2003, p. 5) speak more optimistically: “…dualism in recent years has even enjoyed something of a renaissance.”) It was true at the end of the previous century and has been true during the beginning of this century that “mainstream orthodoxy consists of various versions of materialism” (Searle  1992, p. xiii). Nevertheless a change in the tide is evidenced by a brief overview of the publication record. The decades following Dennett’s decisive declaration saw a variety of substantial publications questioning physicalism and supporting nonphysicalist and dualist views. In this post, I’ll highlight a handful of noteworthy works from 1980 to the present.

In the early eighties, the Gifford lectures given by the well-known neuroscientist, Nobel laureate, and dualist, John Eccles were published under the title The Human Psyche. In that volume Eccles (1980) argued against materialism and for a dualist-interactionist position. A couple years later, Howard Robinson (1982) published Matter and Sense: A Critique of Contemporary Materialism with Cambridge University Press (hereafter CUP). The same year Frank Jackson (1982, p. 130) presented his well-known Knowledge Argument against physicalism using his infamous thought experiment involving a hypothetical neuroscientist named ‘Mary’ (see also Jackson  1986).

In the mid-eighties, Oxford University Press (hereafter OUP) published The Evolution of the Soul, in which Richard Swinburne (1986) argues for substance dualism. Two years later W.D. Hart (1988) argued for substance dualism in The Engines of the Soul published by CUP. Hart was well aware that he was swimming against the current of mainstream materialism. “But orthodoxy needs devil’s advocates,” he wrote, “they have a serious part in the play of ideas even if committed heterodoxy invites excommunication” (1988, p. x). Before the decade closed, the University of Virginia Press published The Case for Dualism (Smythies and Beloff  1989).

The nineties also saw substantive publications that questioned physicalism as well as publications that favored dualism. The year of 1991 witnessed several publications. Oxford Press published David Hodgson’s (1991) The Mind Matters: Consciousness and Choice in a Quantum World, which challenged a reductive physicalist mechanistic view of the mind. Roderick Chisholm published ‘On the Simplicity of the Soul’ in Philosophical Perspectives. Chisholm (1991, p. 167) argued that the nature of human persons is completely unlike that of compound physical things. And Routledge published John Foster’s (1991) The Immaterial Self: A defense of the Cartesian dualist conception of the mind. Two years after the prolific year of 1991, a volume edited by Howard Robinson (1993) entitled Objections to Physicalism was published by OUP. And evidently Hart wasn’t excommunicated for defending his unorthodox dualist position in the eighties. In the mid-nineties he wrote a section on dualism for A Companion to Philosophy of Mind published by Blackwell. Also in the mid-nineties, CUP published E.J. Lowe’s (1996) Subjects of Experience, in which Lowe defends a distinctly non-Cartesian dualism. And OUP published David Chalmers’s (1996) influential work The Conscious Mind, in which Chalmers endorses a form of property dualism. Just before the turn of the millennium William Hasker (1999) advocated for emergent substance dualism in The Emergent Self, published by Cornell University Press.

The new millennium brought new works challenging physicalism as well as new works supporting dualism. In 2001, CUP published Physicalism and Its Discontents. In 2005, David Oderberg published ‘Hylemorphic Dualism’ in Personal Identity, a volume published by CUP and edited by Ellen Frankel Paul, et al. The Waning of Materialism, edited by Robert Koons and George Bealer was published by OUP in 2010. This volume includes intriguing chapters authored by leading philosophers, such as Laurence BonJour’s ‘Against Materialism’ and E.J. Lowe’s ‘Substance Dualism: A Non-Cartesian Approach.’

In 2011, Continuum published The Soul Hypothesis, which includes contributions by Dean Zimmerman, William Hasker, and Daniel Robinson. The same year, in the article ‘No Pairing Problem’ published in Philosophical Studies, Andrew Bailey and company contended that Jaegwon Kim’s argument against substance dualism based on the causal pairing problem fails. The following year witnessed the publication of After Physicalism, which includes chapters by the likes of E.J. Lowe, Alvin Plantinga, John Foster, Richard Swinburne, and Howard Robinson. And an interdisciplinary research project funded by the Templeton Foundation entitled ‘Neuroscience & the Soul’ kicked off (see Crisp et al.  2016).

Also in 2012, Christof Koch, who co-instigated the contemporary search for neural correlates of consciousness with Francis Crick, diverged from today’s dominant doctrine. In Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist, Koch (2012, p. 152) writes:

The dominant intellectual position of our day and age is physicalism – at rock bottom all is reducible to physics. There is no need to appeal to anything but space, time, matter, and energy. Physicalism—a halftone away from materialism—is attractive because of its metaphysical sparseness. It makes no additional assumptions. In contrast, such simplicity can also be viewed as poverty. This book makes the argument that physicalism by itself is too impoverished to explain the origin of mind. In the previous chapter, I sketched an alternative account that augments physicalism. It is a form of property dualism: The theory of integrated information postulates that conscious, phenomenal experience is distinct from its underlying physical carrier.

To some, Koch’s willingness to diverge from the physicalism so widely assumed in neuroscience might be surprising. But for the historian of neuroscience, Koch’s intellectual courage might be reminiscent of Wilder Penfield’s (1975, p. 114) words: “…as a scientist, I reject the concept that one must be either a monist or a dualist because that suggests a ‘closed mind.’”

In 2013, two works in favor of dualism arrived on the scene. Richard Fumerton’s (2013) Knowledge, Thought, and the Case for Dualism appeared in the Cambridge Studies in Philosophy series and Richard Swinburne’s (2013) Mind, Brain, & Free Will was published by OUP. One year later Contemporary Dualism: A Defense was added to the Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy series. And Tomas Bogardus argued that prima facie justification for dualism persists undefeated in ‘Undefeated Dualism,’ published by Philosophical Studies.  2015 witnessed the start of another study funded by the Templeton Foundation. Led by Tim Crane, The New Directions in the Study of the Mind based at Cambridge investigated non-physicalist views of the mind. In 2016, CUP published Howard Robinson’s From the Knowledge Arguments to Mental Substance: Resurrecting the Mind, in which he makes a case for substance dualism.

Dualism doubled down in 2018 with the début of The Blackwell Companion to Substance Dualism. Also worth noting, Routledge released Consciousness and the Ontology of Properties edited by Mihretu Guta. In this volume J.P. Moreland argues that substance dualism provides the best explanation for the unity of consciousness and Richard Swinburne argues against “the supposed causal closure of physics”. I, too, make a contribution, arguing that neural correlates of consciousness (for brevity NCC) are neutral vis-à-vis physicalist and dualist views of the mind. Building upon that work, in ‘Aristotelian Causation and Neural Correlates of Consciousness’ published by Topoi, I propose the Mind-Body Powers model of NCC informed by Thomas Aquinas’s human ontology and Aristotelian causation. Also worth noting, Howard Robinson, J.P. Moreland, Angus Menuge, and Charles Taliaferro contributed to Christian Physicalism: Philosophical Theological Criticisms. And before this year closes, the Central European University in Budapest will be hosting Dualism in the Twenty-First Century. Who knows what the New Year will bring? So, yes, it appears that various versions of dualism are in the process of being dusted off.

Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Christof Koch for constructive feedback on a prior draft of this post.

References

Bailey, A.M., Rasmussen, J. and Horn, L.V. (2011) No Pairing Problem. Philosophical Studies, 154: (3): 349-360.

Baker, M.C. and Goetz, S. (eds) (2011) The Soul Hypothesis: Investigations into the Existence of the Soul, New York, NY: Continuum

BonJour, L. (2010) “Against Materialism”. In: Koons, R.C. & Bealer, G. (eds) The Waning of Materialism. New York, NY, Oxford University Press 3-24

Chalmers, D.J. (1996) The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. New York, NY: Oxford University Press

Chisholm, R.M. (1991) On the Simplicity of the Soul. Philosophical Perspectives, 5: 167-181

Crisp, T., Porter, S. and Elschof, G.T. (eds) (2016) Neuroscience and the Soul: The Human Person in Philosophy, Science, and Theology: Eerdmans

Dennett, D. (1978) Current Issues in the Philosophy of Mind. American Philosophical Quarterly, 15: 249-261

Eccles, J. (1980) The Human Psyche. Heidelberg, Germany: Springer International

Foster, J. (1991) The Immaterial Self: A defense of the Cartesian dualist conception of the mind. New York, NY: Routledge

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Hart, W.D. (1988) The Engines of the Soul. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press

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Hodgson, D. (1991) The Mind Matters: Conciousness and Choice in a Quantum World. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press

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Lowe, E.J. (1996) Subjects of Experience. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press

Lowe, E.J. (2010) “Substance Dualism: A Non-Cartesian Approach”. In: Koons, R.C. & Bealer, G. (eds) The Waning of Materialism. New York, NY, Oxford University Press

O’Conner, T. and Robb, D. (eds) (2003) Philosophy of Mind: Contemporary Readings, New York, NY: Routledge

Oderberg, D.S. (2005) “Hylemorphic Dualism”. In: Paul, E.F.;Fred D. Miller, J. & Paul, J. (eds) Personal Identity. New York, NY, Cambridge University Press 70-99

Penfield, W. (1975) The Mystery of the Mind: A Critical Study of Consciousness and the Human Brain. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press

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Robinson, H. (1993) Objections to Physicalism. New York, NY: Oxford University Press

Searle, J.R. (1992) The Rediscovery of the Mind. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press

Smythies, J.R. and Beloff, J. (eds) (1989) The Case for Dualism, Charlottesville, Virginia: University of Virginia Press

Swinburne, R. (1986) The Evolution of the Soul. Revised Edition.New York, NY: Oxford University Press

Swinburne, R. (2013) Mind, Brain, and Free Will. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press

Wachter, D.v. (2006) Why the Argument from Causal Closure Against the Existence of Immaterial Things is Bad.

Matthew Owen

Matthew Owen(PhD, University of Birmingham) is a faculty member in the philosophy department at Yakima Valley College in Washington State. He is also an affiliate faculty member at the Center for Consciousness Science, University of Michigan. Matthew’s latest book isMeasuring the Immeasurable Mind: Where Contemporary Neuroscience Meets the Aristotelian Tradition.