Nathan Nathan

You have a body, but you are a soul or self. Without your body, you could still exist. Your body could be and perhaps is outlasted by the immaterial substance which is your soul or self. Thus the substance dualist. Most substance dualists are Cartesians. The self, they suppose, is essentially conscious: it cannot exist unless it thinks or wills or has experiences. In this paper I sketch out a different form of substance dualism. I suggest that it is not consciousness but another immaterial feature which is essential to the self, a feature in one way analogous to a non-dispositional taste. Each self has moreover a different feature of this general kind. If this is right then simple and straightforward answers are available to some questions which prove troublesome to the Cartesian, consciousness-requiring type of substance dualist. I mean the questions, How can the self exist in dreamless sleep?, What distinguishes two simultaneously existing selves, and What makes a self the same self as a self which exists at some other time?

Some people believe that God made it a condition for His forgiveness even of repentant sinners that Jesus died a sacrificial death at human hands. Often, in the New Testament, this doctrine of Objective Atonement seems to be implied, as when Jesus spoke of his blood as ‘shed for many for the remission of sins’ , or when St Paul said that ‘Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures’ . And for many centuries the doctrine was indeed accepted by most if not all Christian theologians. It seems in fact to be an essential part of Christianity, which adherents of that religion cannot reject without undermining the authority both of their scriptures and of a very long tradition. It looks then as if objections to the doctrine are objections to the Christian scheme itself. Here is one of them. As the Gospels present it Jesus was murdered, by one or more of Pilate, the Sanhedrin and the Jewish mob. Given Objective Atonement, God ordained the sacrificial death of Jesus, and so, as it seems, this murder. Murder requires freedom on the killer's part. And many have doubted that an action can be both free and ordained by God. Leave that aside. A good God would in any case not make it a condition for our forgiveness that someone acquired the guilt of murder

Direct Realists believe that perception involves direct awareness of an object not dependent for its existence on the perceiver. Howard Robinson rejects this doctrine in favour of a Sense-Datum theory of perception. His argument against Direct Realism invokes the principle ‘same proximate cause, same immediate effect’. Since there are cases in which direct awareness has the same proximate cerebral cause as awareness of a sense datum, the Direct Realist is, he thinks, obliged to deny this causal principle. I suggest that although Direct Realism is in more than one respect implausible, it does not succumb to Robinson’s argument. The causal principle is true only if ‘proximate cause’ means ‘proximate sufficient cause’, and the Direct Realist need not concede that there is a sufficient cerebral cause for direct awareness of independent objects.

The self is one of the perennial topics in philosophy, and also one of the most debated. Its existence has been both defended and contested in equal measure by philosophers including Descartes and Hume. A Map of Selves: Beyond Philosophy of Mind proposes an original and compelling defense of selfhood. N. M. L. Nathan argues that the self is an enduring substance with a unique quality not shared with any other substance. He criticizes the panpsychist theory that material objects are composed of selves analogous to ours and argues for the existence of at least one transcendent self, whose activity explains both our own existence and the existence of the natural world. He concludes by considering how the world would be for us if such selves did not exist, and we were, as some philosophers think we are, not selves, but, e.g., brains or simply sequences of mental events. A radical and innovative philosophical theory of the self, A Map of Selves: Beyond Philosophy of Mind will be of interest to those working on the philosophy of self and personal identity, philosophy of mind and metaphysics.