Tonight I'm going to run through a number of distinctions and kind of give an overview

sort of the image of different views that people have had about souls throughout history

and a little bit of their relationship to ways of thinking about that in relationship to contemporary neuroscience.

I'm going to start though with the topic of the human person because Optima gets foregrounded too quickly as we jump into brains and souls and don't quite think about why we even wanted them in the first place.

And what I'm going to try to draw attention to is ways in which people have thought souls or brains provide different or complementary or competitive

explanatory accounts of human persons. So start with the thing, the explanandum, the thing we want to explain first.

Then I'm going to look at three different types of explanatory concepts of souls, as well as looking at some others as well.

And then I'm going

to briefly give what I referred to sometimes as a 2,500 year potted history of the

developments of our understanding of the brain and how its relationship to different concepts of soul

and the reason for that is if there's anything like a thesis is that these concepts of soul. And the reason for that is, if there's anything like a thesis,

is that these concepts of soul have been defended on purely philosophical grounds, and

the different concepts have had different understandings of the way in which biology is related

to the soul. And those philosophical concepts of soul

have surprisingly been resilient

to major changes in biology.

It's not that they've ignored those major changes in biology,

rather those changes in biology

aren't maybe perhaps as radically undermining

of those philosophical

concepts of soul as we might think, and that two very different views of souls, Aristotelian

souls and Cartesian souls, have been able consistently to accommodate themselves to that,

...