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Mind, Brain, and Free Will . By Richard Swinburne . Oxford University Press , 2013, pp. 242. ISBN: 978-0-19-966256-2 (Hbk.) £50. ISBN: 978-0-19-966257-9 (Pbk.) £18.99
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In Mind, Brain, and Free Will Richard Swinburne argues from the epistemic interstice between our knowledge of quantitative states of matter and that of qualitative states of consciousness to an ontological dualism of material and immaterial substances. It is a development, in greater detail, of the argument presented in chapter 3 of The Evolution of the Soul.1From this ontological dualism he further deduces that human beings are essentially immaterial and indivisible subjects of mental events. He then proceeds to reason to the probable, but less than certain, truth of the libertarian account of freedom of the will, and from that to a realist account of moral responsibility (presenting his case in terms of moral objectivism but allowing moral subjectivists their own reading).
I think the book is not merely of interest because it is a counter-cultural philosophical anthropology, at odds with the current materialism that inclines many to conflate physics and metaphysics. It is also important because it raises fundamental issues about starting-points and navigation-points in philosophy, and because there are practical consequences that issue from the conclusions.
First, there is the question of the starting-point. Although chapter 1 is entitled 'Ontology', Swinburne's argument to substance dualism is an argument from epistemology (we cannot deduce the content of mental events from a description of associated physical events) to ontology (therefore mental events belong in a different ontological category only contingently related to physical events).
He says that he wants to be able to tell the complete history of the world. Such a history would be a description of the sequence of events that constitute that history. Swinburne defines an event as the instantiation of a property in a substance at some time, a time being any period bounded by instants. But what counts as a substance, and what counts as a property, is relative to language; and so what counts as an event is relative to some description, and any event will admit of many descriptions. Therefore, what Swinburne needs is a single formula denoting all the properties instantiated...