Neuroscience and the Soul | James Madden
The Thomistic Institute
The Thomistic Institute
4.8 • 873 Ratings
🗓️ 16 January 2019
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This talk was offered on January 15, 2019 at Harvard Medical School. For more information about upcoming TI events, visit: thomisticinstitute.org/events-1/
Speaker Bio:
Dr. James Madden is Professor of Philosophy at Benedictine College. He lives in Atchison, Kansas with his wife (Jennifer) and their six children; William, Martha, J. Patrick, Brendan, Jack, and Cormac. He is originally from Wisconsin, where he received a B.A. from St. Norbert College, and did his graduate work at Kent State (MA, 1998) and Purdue (Ph.D., 2002). He was awarded the Benedictine College Distinguished Educator of the Year Award in 2006.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm here not necessarily to argue for, you know, a belief in the soul or give a proof of a soul or something like that. |
| 0:10.0 | What I want to do is clarify what the tradition of philosophers that I sort of think with, that I've, that I, that I worked within what we think a soul is, and I want to contrast that with the way I think most |
| 0:25.8 | of you probably think about the soul, or kind of the popular person on the street thinks |
| 0:30.5 | of a soul. |
| 0:31.2 | Okay. |
| 0:31.8 | So I think that confusion is what leads to a lot of the problems that probably led a lot of you |
| 0:36.5 | to come to this talk. |
| 0:37.7 | Okay. I'm not going to come to this talk. Okay. |
| 0:38.9 | I'm not going to read to you except at the onset, right? |
| 0:43.6 | There's one quotation I want to read to you. |
| 0:45.9 | It comes from a philosopher named Herbert McCabe, was a Dominican, and it goes like this. |
| 0:53.9 | Christians are sometimes thought to believe that people |
| 0:57.5 | have souls rather in the way that others believe in Father Christmas or in fairies at the |
| 1:03.0 | bottom of the garden. I mean, souls are thought to be extra entities besides what are recognized by |
| 1:09.4 | other, perhaps more skeptical and tough-minded people. |
| 1:13.5 | We all know about bodies, but Christians are thought to tell us that, besides the visible bodies that we can scientifically examine, there are other invisible things, called souls, more or less loosely attached to those bodies. |
| 1:28.0 | Okay, end quote. |
| 1:29.5 | You know, I'll call that the Garden Fairy Theory of the Soul, which I know is, like, rude and dismissive. |
| 1:34.2 | Okay. |
| 1:36.2 | And it's not the view that McCabe holds, and it's not the view that I hold. |
| 1:39.6 | Okay, and it's not the view of the tradition I'm trying to represent to you today. |
| 1:44.3 | On the Garden Fairy view of the tradition I'm trying to represent to you today. On the garden fairy view of the soul, the distinctive claim it makes is it thinks of the soul |
... |
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