INTRODUCTION - The Evolution of the Soul by Richard Swinburne - credulitàtestimonianzacarità sostanzialismoeproprietarismo
1@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ Glossario Mind/Body problem: 3 posizioni (monismo, prop., sost.) Principi guida dell' inferenza: Principio di conservazione + principio di testimonianza + principio di semplicità + principio di carità Edit
Part I will analyse the different facets of the mental life, enjoyed by animals as well as men-sensations, thoughts, purposes, desires, and beliefs.Read more at location 127
Part iI will argue that we can only make sense of the continuity of this conscious life by supposing that there are two parts to a man (and to many another animal)-a body and a soul (or mind).Read more at location 129
Part III will go on to consider the differences between the mental life of men and that of other animals.Read more at location 134
'Taller than' is a relation which relates two substances; 'lying between' is a relation which relates three substances.Read more at location 172
All material objects are substances, but a crucial issue is whether there are substances other than material objects, things which interact with material objects, but which are not themselves material objects and perhaps do not even have spatial position. Read more at location 186
The first position, which I shall call hard materialism, claims that the only substances are material objects, and personsRead more at location 207
The second position on these issues I shall call soft materialism. (It is sometimes called attribute or property dualism.) Soft materialism agrees with hard materialism that the only substances are material objects, but it claims that some of these have mental properties which are distinct from physical properties.Read more at location 223
Soft materialism says that you have told the whole story of the world when you have said which material objects exist and which properties (mental and physical) they have. However, full information of this kind would still leave you ignorant of whether some person continued to live a conscious life or not. Knowledge of what happens to bodies and their parts will not show you for certain what happens to persons. I shall illustrate this in Chapter 8 with the example of brain transplants.Read more at location 232
The point, which I shall be developing at length, is that mere knowledge of what happens to bodies does not tell you what happens to persons. Hence there must be more to persons than bodies.Read more at location 243
Mental events which happen to the human being do so in virtue of happening to his soul; bodily events which happen to the human being do so in virtue of happening to his body. This is dualism, the position which I shall defend. Read more at location 247
there can be no justified general account of the nature of the soul; all we can say is that under normal mundane conditions the functioning of the soul requires the functioning of the body. My form of dualism might be called `soft dualism'. Read more at location 250
The first and most general principle of inductive inference is the Principle of Credulity: that in the absence of counter-evidence probably things are as they seem to he,Read more at location 255
The principle of credulity that an individual ought to believe that things are as they seem to him is backed up by the Principle of Testimony: that individuals ought to believe the reports of others about how things seemed to them, and so (given the principle of credulity) that things were as they report-in the absence of counter-evidence.Read more at location 281
Principle of Simplicity. Among such theories we take the simplest one as that most likely to be true-or, more precisely, in a given field, we take as most likely to be true the simplest theory which fits best with other theories of neighbouring fields to produce the simplest set of theories of the world. The simplest theory is that which postulates few substances, few kinds of substances, mathematically simple properties of substances determining their mode of interaction with other substancesRead more at location 291
Principle of Charity. Other things being equal, we suppose that other men are like ourselves-inRead more at location 314
The above principles of inductive inference will be used from time to time in subsequent argument. They are, I suggest, the basic principles used by science.
