Soul, Body, and Survival: Essays on the Metaphysics of Human Persons

This is an excellent collection of original articles with a very specific focus, namely western mind-body dualism and whether it is the view of survival contained in Christian scripture.... The book is well worth acquiring. There are many reasons to think that reductive materialism has completely failed in its efforts to get rid of subjectivity, qualia, free will, rationality and the rest of the basic furniture of folk psychology. Whether or not you think Conservative Christianity is a live option philosophically and theologically, its exponents are very much alive and dominate contemporary American philosophy of religion. Soul, Body and Survival is a valuable addition to my library, and I have put it alongside books suggesting process, disembodied soul and reincarnationist views of survival or advocating both western and non-western philosophical and religious views that there is no self to survive.

Are human beings made up of two separate entities, the mind and the body, or are we a psychosomatic unity? Is there life after death? If so, what form does it take, and does it require human beings to be made up of two separate entities, one of which is left behind at death (the 'body') and the other which continues (the 'mind' or 'soul')? These are the questions which form the substance of this book.

Soul, Body, and Survival is a good collection that comes along at a propitious time, just when there is renewed interest in the topics it addresses. There are new models of resurrection afloat, greater efforts to make use of the latest work in metaphysics on personal identity, and more serious attempts to understand the Thomistic model. The authors in this book are among the most important contributors to these debates.