Richard Swinburne's Account Of Duality And Materialism

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Another point described is of a human person’s soul or make up has a different relationship to the body. The mind informs and than forms of other types of natural substances. As noted above, Aquinas conceives of a rational soul as able to subsist without informing any material body. For human persons, material continuity is not required for the same dualistic soul form to persist.11 The contention that the similarity of mind alone conserves a human person’s identity comes to the fore in Aquinas’s account of bodily resurrection, in which he asserts that the uniqueness of a resurrected human person is “made when the same soul is conjoined to the numerically same body.”12 The characteristics of a resurrected body is affected by nothing other than its being informed by the same soul that informed it before death. This unleashes the potential because a soul is the intellectual and immaterial mind of its body and is that by which the body exists with specific tangible limits creating an individual human person. …show more content…

Substances are those things that have properties; for example, tables and persons are substances that have properties such as being round or six feet tall. Events are particular substances having particular properties at particular time. Material substances, he writes, are those that occupy space; immaterial ones do not. Events and properties may be physical or mental.
“Swinburne defends the view that humans are composed of both a material body and a nonmaterial soul. That is, while humans are composed to some degree by physical parts, for example bones, organs, tissue, and muscle. Swinburne believes that one property of humans consciousness is not identified to a simply physical body. To account for consciousness, he argues, one must posit a soul. Moreover, he argues that the human soul is the product of evolutionary

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