The Human Person: Animal and Spirit

Extract

In 1988 David Braine, who has taught philosophy at the University of Aberdeen for many years, published The Reality of Time and the Existence of God, a metaphysical proof of God’s existence. Now, in this second book, The Human Person: Animal and Spirit (Duckworth, London, 1993) which certainly stands on its own although we are frequently referred back to the earlier book and forward to two (if not three) forthcoming volumes, he reconstructs the argument advanced by Thomas Aquinas in favour of our immortality, an even more audacious enterprise in the present intellectual climate.

The first move is to cut off every form of dualism which splits the animals that we human beings are into parts that then have to be related to one another. The traditional mind/body dualism to which Platonist Christians have always been attracted is, so David Braine argues, no different from the brain/mind identity theories which currently flourish under such labels as physicalism, behaviourism and so on. While of course he conducts the argument with reference in general terms to current literature he is surely right in saying that the modern debates raise no issues that would surprise Aquinas. The Platonists paid attention only to the immateriality of the human intellect while the pre-Socratic Ionians believed that knowledge is simply physical (cf Summa Theologiae, la 84, 2). The greater threat nowadays to the unitariness of the human being is, as Braine says, various forms of materialism and, in particular, some of the Artificial Intelligence theories.