Michiel Verhasselt 01904652

SWINBURNE’S MODAL ARGUMENT FOR THE EXISTENCE OF SOULS

In this homework, I give a summary and a critique of the second paper by Rostalska and
Urbaniak. This homework is divided into three parts, in the first part, I sketch the goal of
the paper, in the second part, I give a summary of the content of the paper, and the third
part contains my critique of the paper.

The second paper gives an evaluation of Swinburne’s modal argument for the existence
of the soul. It presents the objections that have been made against Swinburne’s
argument and modifies his argument to withstand its biggest objections. However, by
doing this, the argument becomes epistemically circular.

The paper starts by giving a formalization of Swinburne’s argument. By using modal

propositions, this argument states that Swinburne has a soul in 1984. Shoemaker
critiques Swinburne’s argument by stating that existence claims cannot be justified by
thought experiments. Hasker also stated that Swinburne’s argument is epistemically
circular, because no reasonably informed person would accept the premise if he hadn’t
already accepted the conclusion.

The biggest objection to the paper is called the Substitution Objection. In this Objection,
“Swinburne is purely material in 1984” gets inserted in his modal argument, which
makes the conclusion that Swinburne has a soul in 1984 impossible. Swinburne reacts to
this objection by stating that this substitution is not usable, because it isn’t compatible
with the fact that Swinburne is a conscious person and exists in 1984, and that
Swinburne’s body is destroyed in the last instant of 1984.

The authors first try to evade the Substitution Objection by modifying Swinburne’s
argument. They add a range to the argument so that only sentences that are about 1984
can be inserted. However, doing this doesn’t work, because it gives us an argument that
is not logically coherent and that destroys Swinburne’s own argument.

Then, the author gives a reformulation of Swinburne’s argument that states that a
proposition needs to be true about 1984 to be introducible in the argument. But, doing
this also leads to circularity, because we already need to agree with the underlying
philosophical position to accept the argument.

In this paper, I would’ve fleshed out more of the other critiques that exist besides the
Objection critique, and used them too to make formalizations of Swinburne’s argument
that are immune to them.