Surprisingly, materialists and dualists often appeal to the same factors in their depiction of being an embodied, human person: sensations, agency, and causal underpinnings. I propose that this picture be expanded to include epistemic, structural, and affective components. I further propose that these elements, taken together, be construed as virtues. Being an embodied, human person consists in the exercise of six types of virtues: Sensory Virtues, the Virtue of Agency, Constitutional Virtues, Epistemic Virtues, Structural Virtues, and Affective Virtues. This project (...) draws on recent contributions to virtue epistemology and to the philosophical analysis of self-respect. (shrink)

This is a revised and updated version of Swinburne's controversial treatment of the eternal philosophical problem of the relation between mind and body. He argues that we can only make sense of the interaction between the mental and the physical in terms of the soul, and that there is no scientific explanation of the evolution of the soul.

This article focuses on two questions about the doctrine of the resurrection, questions that will occur to most philosophers and theologians interested in identity in general, and in personal identity in particular. The first question is: how? How could a body that at the end of this life was frail and feeble be the very same body as a resurrection body, a body which will not be frail or feeble, but will instead be glorified? Moreover, how could a body that (...) has passed out of existence – perhaps as a result of decay or cremation – come back into existence on the Day of Resurrection? The second question is: why? Why would anyone want a resurrection of the body? And even if the resurrection delivers something that we want – maybe one's current body has some sentimental value and so having it back would be nice – we might still wonder why any religion would give the doctrine a central place, as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all do. (shrink)

Great philosophical problems are known by their power to rise, phoenix-like, from the ashes of their own dissolution. Indeed, it may be only thus that we are finally convinced of the enduring significance of a problem. The mind-body problem has been dissolved at least twice in the last fifty years: once by the positivists, and again by the therapeutic analysts. Yet it strongly re-asserts itself, so that it is barely a hyperbole when Wilfrid Sellars says that this problem ‘soon turns (...) out, as one picks at it, to be nothing more nor less than the philosophical enterprise as a whole’. (shrink)

Finally, he looks at,the various kinds of unity of the body, both in itself and in its union with the soul.Spirits and Clocks continues Des Chene's highly ...

In a recent address to the American Catholic Philosophical Association, Alfred Freddoso has claimed that dualism is both religiously and morally pernicious. He contends that dualism runs afoul of the Catholic teaching that the soul is the form of the body, and that dualism leaves the body with nothing more than instrumental moral worth. On the contrary, I argue that dualism per se is neither religiously nor morally pernicious. Dualism is compatible with a rich teleology of embodiment that will underwrite (...) all of the same moral insights about the body that traditional hylomorphism supports. (shrink)

Theories of the human person differ greatly in their ability to underwrite a metaphysics of resurrection. This paper compares and contrasts a number of such views in light of the Christian doctrine of resurrection. In a Christian framework, resurrection requires that the same person who exists on earth also exists in an afterlife, that a postmortem person be embodied, and that the existence of a postmortem person is brought about by a miracle. According to my view of persons (the Constitution (...) View), a human person is constituted by—but not identical to—a human organism. A person has a first-person perspective essentially, and an organism has interrelated biological functions essentially. I shall argue for the superiority the Constitution View as a metaphysical basis for resurrection. (shrink)