Alastair McIntyre is a very prominent contemporary Catholic philosopher, and he started out his most recent book by saying he's going to do both too much and too little.

And I, too, am going to make a weasily cowardly preface to the beginning of my lecture that I'm going to do too much and too little.

I'm doing too much, I'm going to cover a great deal material, material that normally I would

talk to my students about for 15 weeks to do it responsibly. So I'm going to do too much in that sense,

and I'm going to do too little in the sense that I'm going to do very little to head off objections

on controversial points and that sort of thing. We can do that in the question-answer period.

Basically, what I want to do is not necessarily to argue for anything tonight,

but to give you a snapshot, just a sense of how it is someone who comes from the tradition of philosophizing that I come from,

how it is we think about what a soul is and why if you think about a soul

in that way it poses no difficulty for anything that the neuroscience is discover okay does that make

sense so it's less less that I've come here to prove something it's more I've come to show you

what it would be like to think about a soul this way. Okay. So first I want to talk about a way that I want to recommend to

you not to think about a soul, okay, which I suspect it's probably the way many of you do think

about the soul. Okay, so this is where I'm going to be a little snotty.

Okay.

And to be safe while being snotty, I'm going to quote somebody else.

All right.

So it's him.

This is a quote from a Dominican priest by the name of Herbert McCabe, who died, I think, in the only 2000s.

But quoting McCabe, Christians are sometimes thought to believe that people have souls,

rather in the way that others believe in Father Christmas, or in 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

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