Abstract
A persistent tradition in metaphysics of mind insists that there is a substantial difference between mind and body. Avicenna’s numerous arguments, for a millennium, have encouraged the view that minds are essentially immaterial substances. In the first part, I redesign and offer five versions of such arguments and then I criticize them. First argument (indivisibility) would be vulnerable in terms of two counterexamples. Second argument (universals) confuses existence with location. Third argument (bodily tools) is less problematic than the first two, though I will say a few words about why it may also not be convincing. Fourth argument (infinity) may not support substance dualism, because, I think, abundance is very different from infinity. Fifth argument (senescence) depends on empirically incorrect premises. Hence, it seems that no Avicennian argument can reasonably save substance dualism.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Original Papers
- Modal Realism and the Possibility of Island Universes: Why There are no Possible Worlds
- Counterpart Theories: The Argument from Concern
- A Functional Approach to Ontology
- On the Nature of Persons; Persons as Constituted Events
- Modest Dualism and Individuation of Mind
- Proving God without Dualism: Improving the Swinburne-Moreland Argument from Consciousness
- Holism | Cosmopsychism – And the Collapse of the Wavefunction
- Laws, Dispositions, Memory: Three Hypotheses on the Order of the World
- Response to Book Review
- Self-Relating Internalism: Reply to Vallicella
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Original Papers
- Modal Realism and the Possibility of Island Universes: Why There are no Possible Worlds
- Counterpart Theories: The Argument from Concern
- A Functional Approach to Ontology
- On the Nature of Persons; Persons as Constituted Events
- Modest Dualism and Individuation of Mind
- Proving God without Dualism: Improving the Swinburne-Moreland Argument from Consciousness
- Holism | Cosmopsychism – And the Collapse of the Wavefunction
- Laws, Dispositions, Memory: Three Hypotheses on the Order of the World
- Response to Book Review
- Self-Relating Internalism: Reply to Vallicella