The deepest beliefs’ about personal identity whose consequences Unger seeks to draw out are the beliefs of those who already share his theoretical convictions; and his pain-avoidance’ experiments show nothing unless one already assumes those convictions. If there is a risk’ that I may not survive a brain operation even though I know exactly which chunks of brain will be removed and replaced, that shows that I am a separate thing from my body and brain, about which the latter provide (...) normally reliable, but still fallible evidence. (shrink)

In this review of Richard Swinburne's Is There a God? , Richard Dawkins admires Swinburne's clarity but is unconvinced by his arguments. Dawkins questions, in particular, Swinburne's suggestion that the hypothesis that God exists and sustains his creation is simpler than the hypothesis that there is no God.

Plantinga defines S's belief as ‘privately rational if and only if it is probable on S's evidence’, and ‘publicly rational if and only if it is probable with respect to public evidence’, and he claims that ‘it is an immediate consequence of these definitions that all my basic beliefs are privately rational’. I made it explicitly clear in my review that on my account of a person's evidence (quoted and used by Plantinga) as ‘the content of his basic beliefs (...) (weighted by his degree of confidence in them)’, that is not the case. I emphasize ‘weighted by his degree of confidence in them’. I wrote explicitly: ‘for more or less any belief, however convinced you are of it initially, other evidence of which you are equally convinced could rend it overall improbable’. Put technically, in probabilistic terms, basic beliefs come to us with different degrees of prior probability varying with our degree of confidence in them, but a belief with a high prior probability can in the light of other beliefs of our current set have a lower posterior probability. If you continue to hold on to a basic belief when its probability on the total evidence is below half, that belief is not privately rational. Footnotes1 Note: This brief discussion arises out of Richard Swinburne's critical notice of Alvin Plantinga's Warranted Christian Belief (New York NY: Oxford University Press, 2000) and Plantinga's reply in Religious Studies, 37 (2001), 203–214, 215–222. (shrink)

The article makes a comparative analysis of R. Swinburne’s Cartesian dualism and E. Stump’s Thomistic hylomorphism. These authors are among the few contemporary philosophers who argue for strong dualist positions contrary to physicalism in the philosophy of mind. The main motivation for the comparative analysis lies in the fact that Swinburne’s and Stump’s projects compete both with strong physicalist tendencies and with each other. The author of the article analyses the content of Swinburne’s and Stump’s systems, and (...) provides the main criticism of Cartesian dualism and Thomistic hylomorphism. The distinction between Cartesian dualism and Thomistic hylomorphism is examined. A number of similarities between the positions of Swinburne and Stump are highlighted, but philosophically significant differences are also observed. The author concludes that, despite having its own significant philosophical problems, Stump’s Thomistic hylomorphism is superior to Swinburne’s dualism in a number of aspects and has more prospects for defense. (shrink)