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The Flying and the Masked Man, One More Time: Comments on Peter Adamson and Fedor Benevich, ‘The Thought Experimental Method: Avicenna's Flying Man Argument’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 August 2020

JARI KAUKUA Open the ORCID record for JARI KAUKUA [Opens in a new window]
JARI KAUKUA*
Affiliation:
UNIVERSITY OF JYVÄSKYLÄ[email protected]
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Abstract

This is a critical comment on Adamson and Benevich (2018), published in issue 4/2 of the Journal of the American Philosophical Association. I raise two closely related objections. The first concerns the objective of the flying man: instead of the question of what the soul is, I argue that the argument is designed to answer the question of whether the soul exists independently of the body. The second objection concerns the expected result of the argument: instead of knowledge about the quiddity of soul, I claim the argument yields knowledge about the soul's existence independently of the body. After the objections, I turn to the masked man fallacy, claiming that although the Adamson-Benevich interpretation does save the argument from the fallacy, this comes at the cost of plausibility. I then give a more modest interpretation that both avoids the fallacy and is plausible. The paper concludes with a remark about the metaphysical possibility of the flying man.

Keywords

Avicennaflying manthought experiments
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of the American Philosophical Association , Volume 6 , Issue 3 , Fall 2020 , pp. 285 - 296
Copyright
Copyright © American Philosophical Association 2020

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Footnotes

I am grateful for the collegial discussion with Peter Adamson and Fedor Benevich during the writing of this paper, as well as for the comments from the anonymous referees and my colleagues in Jyväskylä (Davlat Dadikhuda, Yusuf Daşdemir, Hadel Jarada, Kutlu Okan, and Nathan Spannaus). The research was made possible by the generous funding of the European Research Council (grant agreement no. 682779).

References

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