Review Of "The Case For Dualism" Edited By J. R. Smythies And J. Beloff

Document Type

Book Review

Publication Date

5-1-1990

Published In

Choice

Abstract

Fills an important niche in contemporary philosophical and psychological debate. Although deeply engrained in the Western tradition, dualist presumptions--holding the mind and the body to be distinct domains--have fallen on hard times within the present century. Particularly damaging have been physicalist accounts of human functioning, those that hold the individual to be no different in kind from other material objects studied by the sciences. The nine philosophers and psychologists contributing to the present volume attempt to defend dualism against a variety of traditional and contemporary critiques and to reconstruct its intelligibility. Several of the papers (especially those of John Foster, Geoffrey Madell, and Alan Gauld) furnish excellent critiques of the physicalist alternative as it is treated in contemporary epistemology, identity theory, and cognitive psychology; papers by Jonathan Harrison, John Smythies, and Stephen Harrison lay imaginative ground work for new dualistic formulations that might avoid the shortcomings of the old. Although excellent in its criticism of physicalist alternatives, the volume is less compelling in its resuscitation of the dualist perspective. Given the problems with both grounding ontologies (matter and mind), the volume invites skepticism of such foundational undertakings. For advanced undergraduates and above.

Comments

This work is freely available courtesy of Choice Reviews. The review has been reproduced in full in the abstract field.

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