A Brief History of the Soul. By Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. x + 228 pp. $24.95 paper.

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.) The History of a Soul is the story of a lively debate whose arguments, vocabulary, and even subject have evolved over millennia. In this historical narrative cum apologia, Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro champion substance dualism, a philosophical position that asserts the ontologically distinct reality of matter and (or body and mind in post-Cartesian terms). They largely succeed in their efforts to be fair and balanced (4) and succeed in presenting a sophisticated and nuanced yet readable account of the controversy in its philosophical and, to some extent, theological and scientific dimensions. As entailed by the Brief caveat, they maintain a disciplined focus on a relatively few major players in this saga of the soul. Early in the book, the authors capture just how unstable the concept of soul has been in Western thought. Classical thought had already ranged from Plato's independently (and pre-) existing as discrete entity, to Aristotle's non-dualistic version of the human as the formed aspect of the body. Their decision to discuss only Plato and Aristotle among pre-medieval thinkers is reasonable; less defensible is their curious omission of a substantial line of thought in philosophy and theology that is both important to thinking about the in its own right, and especially pertinent to soul-related issues that the authors engage: free will. A commonplace among Christian Fathers especially was the question of the soul's origin. Origen, first church theologian, believed that question was first in priority after addressing the topic of the Trinity itself (On First Principles ). Augustine, as the authors note in chapter 2 (45), postulates four possibilities: traducianism (physical procreation of the by parents), creationism (special creation by God at birth), sent preexistence (God sends preexisting souls to be embodied) and fallen preexistence (human choices result in the embodiment of their preexisting souls). The authors address the merits of theories 1 and 2, but inexplicably drop here and for the remainder of the book the other two options, although the theory of the soul's premortal existence figures prominently with the thought of dozens of subsequent philosophers and theologians, many of whom they discuss. For Plato the idea provided theodicy (Republic X ). Augustine long favored preexistence as carrying less theological baggage than the alternatives and only retreated from the idea when grace became a greater theological concern than free will. The authors mention Henry More's unconventional defense of a that was spatially extended, but neglect his emphatic defense--along with a whole cohort of Cambridge Platonists--of a preexistent soul. Locke found his theory of memory-based human selfhood to render preexistence moot, and Kant, whom the authors discuss along with all the above named, found the soul's preexistence essential to human agency. In the twentieth century as well, philosophers like John McTaggart argued any conception of a human that did not posit its preexistence could not adequately ground a theory of free will, which is clearly of great import to Goetz and Taliaferro.More important to these authors is a sustained defense of dualism itself; a principal form this takes today is to insist that an immaterial is the most effective solution to the bundling problem (87). …