What I want to do today is I'm not so much going to argue for anything, okay?

There'll be some arguing, but more or less what I'm going to do is just try to explain to you

what philosophers in the tradition that I see myself as a part of,

this sort of a broadly Aristotelian to mystic tradition,

which has soft edges in terms of what is or is not in that tradition, broadly what we mean when we talk about a soul, okay, what we mean by that.

And the hope is that you'll see once you understand what we mean by a soul, there is no real

possible conflict between that and the results of modern neurosciences.

Okay.

I think, you know, if I can make my, you know, sort of, I get one a day, like one unverified

sociological generalization, okay?

I suspect most of you are walking around with the conception of a soul that in fact does pick a fight with the neuroscience.

Okay. And I guess I want to tempt you to think about it differently, all right, to think about it in the way

the tradition I occupy thinks about it, so you don't have to pick that fight.

So I'm glad you're a biologist.

So let me read a paragraph to you.

This is from Father Herbert McCabe, a relatively recently late Dominican priest.

He claims the following.

His Christians are sometimes thought to believe that people have souls rather in the way that others believe in Father Christmas or fairies at the bottom of the garden.

I mean souls are thought to be extra entities besides what are recognized

by other, perhaps more skeptical and tough-minded people. 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."

...