Making the Case for the Soul in an Age of Neuroscience

Abstract

Modern philosophy has been inhospitable to the soul. In the English-speaking world, the dominant tendency, since Hobbes and Locke, has been to subordinate the mental to the physical. Even where mental phenomena are granted real existence, they are construed as effects of underlying physical processes. To explain them is to identify their physical causes. Physicalist approaches to the mind cannot but see the soul as, in Gilbert Ryle's derisive phrase, a “ghost in the machine.” It is an unwanted leftover from a religious age with a bygone philosophical psychology. To the extent that mental entities do any explanatory work, modern philosophy favors “mind” over “soul.”