In our discussion of mind, soul, brain, can we reduce it to a binary contestation between the humanistic and the scientific images of the world.
The humanistic image says that we are spiritual beings endowed with free will in such a way that we exercise a quasi-divine prerogative of acting as unmoved movers, the uncaused causes of our actions.
The scientific image says that we are animals who have evolved by natural selection, with highly distinctive – even extraordinary – capacities, but with nothing about us that circumvents the laws of cause and effect.
Is the answer to maintain everything that really matters to us about ourselves from the humanistic image while jettisoning its metaphysical excrescences.
Can we have the best of both worlds a
post-Darwinian conception of the human being made to mesh systematically with a post-Aristotelian conception of persons as beings of a kind whose fulfilment consists in the development of a certain range of character traits (the virtues) that alone permit them to flourish in community with other human beings.
Or do we need to cleave entirely to the scientific image?
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