The substance dualism of Richard Swinburne: current state and criticism

Abstract

This article is one of the first articles in Russian discussing Richard Swinburne’s recent views on the mind-body problem. Richard Swinburne is a contemporary British theolo­gian and analytic philosopher specializing in the philosophy of religion and philosophy of science. In the philosophy of mind, Swinburne defends a quite unpopular position – the substance dualism. This position is based on the cartesian dualism and some old scholastic conceptions. Swinburne tries to advocate all versions of the mind-body dual­ism: he moves from the predicate dualism to the property dualism and then from the property dualism to the substance dualism. As Descartes, Swinburne sees the mental and the physical as two separate domains. In particular, he denies the supervenience the­sis which is shared now by most analytic philosophers of mind and appeals to a causal in­teractionism between mental and physical events. Moreover, Swinburne uses the concept of substance. He defines the substance as something that is not reduced to a collection of properties instantiated in it. With regard to the problem of the nature of a human being, Swinburne shares the compound dualism, according to which the nature of a human be­ing consists of two parts: the essential (mental substance) and the non-essential (physical substance). Based on his substance dualism and the modal argument of Descartes, Swin­burne claims that the existence of the consciousness does not depend on the existence of the physical body. The author gives some objections against Swinburne’s substance dual­ism. Some of these objections are based on the arguments of other famous analytic philosophers. The conclusion states that we cannot take Swinburne’s substance dualism as a correct mind-body theory. The author argues that this philosophical conception intro­duces many unjustified hypotheses and it actually does not do its explainatory job.