NP? The Problem of the Soul

[Doug Millison]

http://human-nature.com/nibbs/02/clark.html


review of 

The Problem of the Soul: Two Visions of the Mind and
How to Reconcile Them
By Owen Flanagan
New York: Basic Books, 2002 ISBN 0-465-02460-2
Published May 28, 2002 $27.50 Hardcover, 352 pages

Reviewed by Thomas W. Clark, Naturalism.Org.



Although we live increasingly in an age of science,
our notions of self and mind remain largely
supernaturalistic. Central to most religious
conceptions of ourselves is the idea that persons
possess a soul, an immaterial essence that persists
after the physical self disappears. If we are not
religious, we might suppose that in addition to being
bodies, we are also mental agents, in that
consciousness and choice depend on something
non-physical above and beyond the brain. Further, it
is widely believed by the religious and non-religious
alike that we have free will, the power to choose
without ourselves or our choices being entirely
determined by natural causes and circumstances.

In The Problem of the Soul, Owen Flanagan, professor
of philosophy, psychology, and brain sciences at Duke
University, takes the unpopular position that all this
is wrong. There is a conflict at the deepest level, he
says, between traditional mind-body dualism and the
scientific truth about the self, which is that we are
entirely physical animals, inseparable from the
natural world. He wants us to reconcile this conflict
by abandoning supernatural conceptions of ourselves
and replacing them with a better, naturalized image
that finally gets the facts right after centuries of
misdirection about the soul.

Following Antonio Damasio in Descartes’ Error,
Flanagan argues that we’ve inherited a
“philosophically diseased” picture of the self,
bequeathed to us by Descartes, who supposed that the
mind was a categorically separate non-physical entity,
issuing commands to the body via the brain’s pineal
gland. Such metaphysical dualism found fertile soil in
the religious tenet that human beings, made in God’s
image, have incorporeal souls which act outside
natural laws, making us the freely willing originators
of our choices.

To cure these long-standing misconceptions, Flanagan
offers us philosophical therapy, mounting a strong,
uncompromising attack on both secular and religious
beliefs supporting the soul, and articulating what
morecautious academics dare not say. There is little
question that science is on his side, since
neuroscientific explanations of perception, cognition,
and behavior leave less and less of a role for a
separate mental agent riding herd on the body. The
brain and its supporting nervous system seem quite
capable of doing all that the soul traditionally was
supposed to do, with the exception, of course, of
making choices that somehow circumvent causality. 

[...] 


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