At The Wall Street Journal, Andrew Stark reviews The Soul Hypothesis, a collection of essays edited by Mark Baker and Stewart Goetz:
Woody Allen may have jauntily cheated on his metaphysics exam by looking into the soul of the student sitting next to him, but for most philosophers the soul has been frustratingly hard to locate. Some ancient thinkers concluded that it had to be a “shade”: a kind of shadow that remains of us when we die. Others conceived of it as an “essence,” a distilled, concentrated version of the self. And still others pondered the possibility that it is more like a “breath,” an animating life force.
These are revealing ideas and metaphors. Among other things, they show a perennial struggle to find physical terms to describe something nonphysical. The philosophical essays collected in “The Soul Hypothesis” seek, in a more up-to-date way, to reconcile the soul with the physical world. Given our secular age, however, the soul that the book’s contributors defend is a stripped-down version.
While older thinkers were looking for a grand soul—the source of immortality, the seat of character, the spark of life—the book’s “soul” consists of only two qualities: the human capacities for voluntary action and mental consciousness. What worries the contributors is that even such a chastened soul—many of us would simply call it “the mind”—seems to have no place, or defensible existence, in the physical world that modern science describes.
Read the full review here.
Jessica Polebaum is a contributing editor for The Immanent Frame and a J.D. candidate at Georgetown University. A former program and editorial associate at the Social Science Research Council, she holds a B.A. in religion from Middlebury College, where her undergraduate work culminated in a senior honors thesis on ijtihad---a concept from classical Islamic law---and its use in modern reform movements. Upon graduating in 2008, she received the Ann and Edward Meyers Religion Prize for exceptional ability in the understanding, expression, and integration of ideas in the area of religious studies.
