Dualism

Dualism in the philosophy of mind is the view that mind and body — or the mental and the physical — are, in some fundamental sense, different kinds of things: both real, neither reducible to the other. It contrasts with monism (there is only one fundamental kind): its main rival is materialism (mind and body are ultimately physical), its mirror image is idealism (everything is ultimately mental), and a recently resurgent fourth option is panpsychism (physical things are deep-down partly or wholly mental). Dualism is one of the three classic responses to the mind-body problem, and in the 2020 PhilPapers survey of professional philosophers it was the second most popular response to the consciousness aspect of that problem — 22% “accept or lean towards” dualism, against 51% materialism and 8% panpsychism (Bourget & Chalmers 2023). This page follows the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry “Dualism” (Robinson & Weir, substantive revision October 2025) throughout. ¹

A Simplifying Introduction

There seem to be two profoundly different kinds of thing in the world. Bodies have size, weight, shape, colour, and a location in space and time; in principle anyone in the right position can observe them. Experiences, thoughts, and feelings seem different in kind: they are private (no one can feel your pain the way you feel it), they feel like something to have, and they can be about things — including things that do not exist, like Zeus or the square root of minus one. ¹

Dualism takes this apparent difference at face value: mind and body are two fundamental kinds — not two ways of describing one kind. The costs are immediate and define the whole debate: if they are so different, how can they interact (the causal question), and what exactly is each supposed to be (the ontological question)? Most contemporary philosophers are materialists, yet dualist intuitions remain so widespread that explaining why we have them has become its own research programme — the “meta-problem of consciousness”. ¹

The Mind-Body Problem

Humans have, or seem to have, the properties attributed in the physical sciences (size, weight, shape, motion through space and time) and properties we do not attribute to ordinary physical things (perceptual and emotional experience, beliefs, desires, agency, subjecthood or selfhood). In its broadest form, the mind-body problem is how beings like us end up with — or seem to have — both; in its sharp form, which takes centre stage after the rise of mechanistic science in the seventeenth century, it is how to reconcile the apparent ontological gulf between mind and body with the fact that they seem to interact so closely. ¹

The problem has an ontological component (what are mind and body; is one ultimately reducible to, or “nothing over and above”, the other?) and a causal component (do physical states influence mental states and vice versa, and how?). Different aspects of the mental raise it differently: consciousness, intentionality, agency, personal identity, subjecthood. Dualism usually enters as a response to the problem as it concerns consciousness; it also intersects the philosophy of religion, where mind-body positions meet doctrines of the soul. ¹

History of Dualism

The idea that humans have a psychological core — a self or soul — that survives bodily death appears in the earliest surviving sources (Shang dynasty oracles, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Homeric poems, the Hebrew Bible, Egyptian funerary texts), and religious practices aimed at the spirits of the dead appear to be culturally universal; data from infant psychology suggest this kind of dualism may be part of how humans naturally conceive of themselves. Philosophical dualism proper emerges in Vedic India and Classical Greece, and both traditions still shape the debate today; early Chinese philosophy regularly presupposes dualism but is less preoccupied with the mind-body problem. Two later events transform the discussion: the spread of the Abrahamic religions in late antiquity, and the emergence of mechanistic science in the early modern period. ¹

Dualism in Indian Philosophy

The Upanishads (c. 700–500 BCE) centre on the nature and destiny of the soul (atman) — an unchanging, imperishable entity that survives bodily death and undergoes successive reincarnations — and the Bhagavad Gita repeats the idea: “The body is mortal, but that which dwells in the body is immortal and immeasurable.” Two of the six orthodox schools articulate detailed dualisms, developed by their sister schools: Samkhya and Yoga represent the soul (purusha) as pure awareness over against nature (prakriti), whereas Vaisheshika and Nyaya attribute volition and cognition to the soul as well. Jainism advances its own form of dualism, and the Buddhist Abhidharma is dualist in a deflationary sense — it divides what we mistake for the self into fleeting “dharmas” of fundamentally mental and fundamentally physical kinds while rejecting any enduring soul (see buddhist-metaphysics). A later argument for the fundamentality of consciousness is the Tang monk Zongmi’s: the qi of heaven and earth is fundamentally lacking in awareness, so how could human awareness simply arise from it? After Shankara (c. 8th century CE) raised non-dual (advaita) Vedanta to unrivalled prominence, Indian thought came to seem idealist-leaning — a perception that reflects Advaita’s dominance more than the whole tradition. ¹

Dualism in Greek Philosophy

Pre-Socratic traces of dualism and reincarnation appear especially among the Pythagoreans, with a speculative (and unproven) possibility of common influence with Vedic India. The earliest surviving full discussions are Plato’s: he assumes a distinction between an invisible soul and a visible body and argues for both the soul’s immortality and its successive reincarnations (Meno, Phaedo, Phaedrus), including the Phaedo’s argument from the soul’s affinity with the eternal forms of which material objects are mere copies. Aristotle (see aristotle) develops hylomorphism instead: material substances are matter organised by form, and the soul of a living thing is its form — so, against Plato, forms cannot exist separately from the matter they organise and the soul cannot survive the body; Aristotle does argue, however, that the intellect (nous) is immaterial, because it is receptive of all forms whereas a material organ is sensitive only to certain things. Epicurus, following Democritus, is the great ancient materialist (the “soul” is a collection of physical atoms that disperse at death — a revival of which influenced modern materialism), and the Stoic “pneuma”, a special spiritual matter pervading the universe, can be seen as anticipating panpsychism. ¹

Dualism in the Abrahamic World

Philo of Alexandria harmonised Platonist soul-doctrine with Jewish scripture; Augustine adopted a version of Plato’s dualism, and is credited by some scholars with introducing the conception of the soul as a subjective inner space. Arabic-Islamic philosophy synthesised (neo-)Platonic and Aristotelian theories of the soul — Al Farabi’s theory of the “active intellect”, Avicenna’s “floating man” thought experiment (a precursor of Descartes’), and Averroes’ doctrine of the “unity of the intellect” (all humans share a single intellect), which cast doubt on individual afterlife. The Latin scholastics inherited this synthesis: Aquinas and Duns Scotus worked within a hylomorphic dualist framework and both opposed Averroes — while disagreeing with each other on whether the soul is the only substantial form organising the body. Aquinas also objects to equating the survival of the soul with the survival of the self, asserting “my soul is not me”. Not every early Abrahamic philosopher was a dualist: Tertullian and Ibn Gabirol argue the soul is, in a sense, material; Hobbes is perhaps the first unambiguously materialist thinker in this world. ¹

Dualism and Mechanistic Science

Descartes marks the decisive modern turn. He argues that mind and body are distinct substances, characterised by thought (for Descartes, all conscious mental states) and extension respectively, and he instigates two shifts that shape everything after him: he combines dualism with a new mechanistic conception of the natural world, and he moves the arguments for the immateriality of the mind from the intellect to consciousness, sensory awareness included. It is also in the context of mechanistic science that the problem of mind-body interaction gains its status as the leading objection to dualism. ¹

Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia questioned immediately whether Descartes could explain how mind and body interact; Leibniz and Berkeley tried to reduce the material half of Descartes’ ontology to the mental (inaugurating idealist traditions); Hume substituted a bundle of fleeting perceptions for the Cartesian mind, echoing Buddhist theories of the self. Dualism nonetheless remained the “official doctrine” — Ryle’s phrase, in 1949, for what “most philosophers, psychologists and religious teachers subscribe [to], with minor reservation”. The anti-dualist revolt had been building for decades: Lovejoy in 1930 looked forward to historians of philosophy remembering the period as the “Age of the Great Revolt against Dualism”. The mid-century alternatives (neutral monism, phenomenalism, behaviourism) were, however, minority positions; only with Place (1956) and Smart (1959) did materialist theories come to dominate — a rise Papineau (2001) ties to the tightening evidence for the causal closure of physics, which otherwise threatens to make the mind an epiphenomenon. Some distinguished neuroscientists (Sherrington, Penfield, Eccles) and philosophers (Plantinga, Swinburne, Kripke, Popper) kept defending dualism; late-century challenges to materialism from a naturalistic perspective (Jackson 1982; Chalmers 1996; Kim 2005) revived property dualism, and a widely shared received view became that while substance dualism is no longer respectable, property dualism must be taken seriously — a preference that is itself regularly challenged. ¹

Varieties of Dualism

Dualisms divide along two axes: what one is a dualist about — substance or property — and which causal relations one recognises between mind and body — interactionism (mind and body act on one another), epiphenomenalism (body acts on mind only), or parallelism (no interaction at all). Hylomorphic dualism sits somewhat apart, questioning the substance/property framing itself. ¹

Substance Dualism

Substance dualism holds that minds and bodies (persons and their bodies) are fundamentally distinct kinds of substance — the kind of view exemplified by Plato, Augustine, and Descartes, and resisted by some recent dualists (Jackson 1982; Kim 2005). “Substance” carries two traditional senses: an independent entity (something that can exist by itself — which properties cannot), and a unitary entity that persists through time (as opposed to Buddhist or Humean bundles). Paradigmatic substance dualists affirm both senses, but the two definitions are logically independent: Nida-Rümelin, for instance, defends a unitary immaterial mind on which the mind need not be able to exist independently, preferring the label “subject-body dualism”. The common assumption that substance dualists posit a Lockean “substratum” is doubtful for Descartes himself, who argues the mind is independent and indivisible but arguably posits no substratum; there is also logical space for immaterial selves that are not substances (complex successions of nonphysical properties) and for immaterial substances that are not selves — Aquinas’s hylomorphic soul may be the latter, where the “substance dualism” label can mislead. Finally, “substance dualism” is often equated with “Cartesian dualism”, but the two come apart: E. J. Lowe’s dualist person is one of two substances, yet not a purely mental substance definable by thought alone. ¹

Property Dualism

The term covers two positions worth separating. Predicate dualism — a kind of non-reductive materialism, hence not dualism in the mind-versus-matter sense — holds that mental predicates are indispensable for a full description of the world and irreducible to physicalistic ones in Nagel’s sense (there are no bridging laws that logically entail all statements about mentality from physical statements). The classic sources are Fodor (1974) for the special sciences generally and Davidson (1971) for the philosophy of mind; the model is the multiply realizable special-science kind — “hurricane” cannot be replaced by any one physical description the way “water” by “H₂O” — and it is compatible with materialism: even if “pain” resists such replacement, every pain-token could be identical with some physical event (Davidson’s own position). Property dualism proper, which revived in the closing decades of the twentieth century, says there are two essentially different kinds of property out in the world: the qualitative nature of consciousness is a genuinely novel phenomenon, not merely another way of categorising states of the brain or of behaviour. Three classic defences are Jackson (1982), Chalmers (1996), and Kim (2005); unlike substance dualists they do not posit immaterial substances (the now-abandoned analogue was the “vital force” once posited for life). Chalmers has clarified that he intends property dualism as entailing nonphysical properties while remaining neutral on nonphysical substances, and has since expressed a preference for substance dualism; Jackson has abandoned property dualism in favour of materialism. ¹

Interactionism

Interactionism — mind and body causally influence each other — is the common-sense option: the physical world affects my experience through my senses, and my thinking influences my speech and action (“a natural prejudice in favour of interactionism”). The naive “billiard ball” objection (how can the immaterial impact the material?) is widely regarded in its bare form as resting on an outmoded picture of causation; the serious challenge is physical science — interaction seems to require causal power flowing into and out of the body, conflicting with conservation of energy and, more generally, the causal closure of physics. Defenders reply with conditionality — conservation principles are conditional on a system’s being causally isolated, and the interactionist simply denies that the human body is isolated (Larmer 1986; Pitts 2019; Cucu and Pitts 2019) — making the matter empirical; Collins (2011) adds that energy is not conserved in general relativity, in quantum theory, or in the universe taken as a whole. If causal overdetermination of behaviour is possible, closure need not exclude mental causes even in principle (Mills 1996), and Lowe (2008) proposes that certain brain events bring about intermediate mental states that then cause the ordinary physical effect in a way “invisible to scientific observation” — at the price of an apparently absurd coincidence or a simplicity sacrifice in theory choice. If physical laws are indeterministic, as quantum theory seems to assert, an immaterial mind might influence outcomes without breaking any law: Eccles and Popper famously speculated along these lines, and others (Hodgson; Stapp) had the mind acting at wave-function collapse. ¹

Epiphenomenalism

Epiphenomenalism says the body acts on the mind but the mind never acts back: mental events are caused by physical events and have no causal influence on the physical. Huxley (1893) gave the view currency, partly from observing reflex responses in frogs; an ancient precursor is the Yoga-Samkhya view that the soul (purusha) is pure awareness with no effect on the natural world (prakriti). It inherits a version of the composition puzzle — if it is mysterious how the non-physical can influence the physical, it should be equally mysterious how the physical can produce the non-physical — but it does promise to avoid the distinctive problems of an immaterial mind acting on a material body. Three objections: it is profoundly counterintuitive (what seems more apparent than that it is the pain you feel that makes you cry?); it seems to leave no reason for conscious states to have evolved (William James 1890) — Jackson’s reply that the sensation is an evolved by-product (like a polar bear’s heavy coat) misfires, since the coat’s heaviness follows from the warmth it provides in a way the mental by-product does not: laws linking mind and brain would be Feigl’s “nomological danglers”, brute facts added onto the body of integrated physical law; and it threatens rationality and belief in other minds — if mental states explain no behaviour, postulating them in others becomes explanatorily redundant, undercutting one’s grounds for believing in others’ minds (and in one’s own rational inference to them). ¹

Parallelism

Parallelism keeps both realms intact but denies all causal interaction: the mental and the physical “run in harmony” with each other, but not through mutual influence. That the two should behave as if interacting would seem a bizarre coincidence — which is why parallelism has tended to be adopted only by those positing a pre-established harmony, set in place by God: Leibniz decided that God might as well set things up so that they always behave as if interacting, without particular intervention being required, building on Malebranche’s occasionalism, in which God intervenes specifically on each occasion interaction would be needed. (The progression: Descartes — natural interaction; Malebranche — divine intervention each time; Leibniz — one divine setup, then automatic.) Outside a theistic framework the theory may seem incredible, and even within one, Berkeley’s instinct was that once genuine interaction is ruled out, one is best advised to let God create the physical world directly within the mental realm, as a construct out of experience. ¹

Hylomorphic Dualism

Hylomorphism explains material substances in terms of matter and the form that organises it, and hylomorphists since Aristotle identify the soul of a living creature with its form. This need not entail any mind-body dualism at all — a human could be a wholly physical composite of matter and form, like a plant — but Aristotle argues that the human soul has an immaterial part, the intellect, making him a kind of dualist “to that extent”, and later hylomorphists such as Aquinas are more thoroughgoing: Aquinas states that the soul is an immaterial substance (Summa Theologiae Q75, A2) and describes it as a unitary, persisting entity capable of disembodied existence. Modern “hylomorphic dualists” disagree whether theirs is a kind of substance dualism, property dualism, or a third theory, and where it stands on interaction: proponents claim an advantage — interaction between mind and body is just one instance of the form-matter interaction going on throughout nature, hence unmysterious — while the debate still turns on the empirical case for causal closure, where hylomorphism arguably has no special advantage. Aquinas’s case illustrates the classification difficulty: he calls the soul a substance but an incomplete one, does not identify the self with it, and makes the human body depend on the soul for its existence — leading some interpreters to read him as an “inverse property dualist”: an immaterial substance with material properties. ¹

Arguments for Dualism

The most influential contemporary arguments for dualism focus on consciousness — the fact that there is “something it is like” to be a mentally endowed creature (Nagel 1974) — above all the knowledge argument and the conceivability argument. Two further motivations covered below are the argument from personal identity and a modern version of the Aristotelian argument; important ones left aside include arguments from free will, from tense, and from the unity of consciousness. ¹

The Knowledge Argument

A future scientist — Harpo — has lacked a sensory modality from birth while acquiring perfect scientific knowledge of how that modality works in others (stone deaf, say, but the world expert on the machinery of hearing). After an operation finally lets him hear, it is suggested he learns something he did not know before: what it is like to hear — the qualitative or phenomenal nature of sound, its qualia. He knew all the physical facts before; so what he learns — facts about the nature of experience — are non-physical. This establishes at least a state or property dualism (Jackson 1982; Robinson 1982). Standard replies: the ability response (he acquires know-how, not new facts — criticized as behaviouristic, and as merely deferring the problem if the ability is to imagine or remember the experience) and the demonstrative-concepts response (his knowledge is factual but not knowledge of a new fact — a new mode of grasping, like “now” and “here” — criticized because phenomenal concepts seem to capture genuine qualitative content, unlike pure demonstratives). ¹

The Conceivability Argument

Two forms: the disembodiment argument (from Descartes, Meditation V; also Kripke 1972) — it is conceivable that one’s mind might exist without one’s body; conceivability implies possibility; therefore mind is a different entity from body — and the zombie argument (Chalmers) — a physical duplicate of a human without consciousness (“philosophical zombie”) is conceivable, hence possible, hence consciousness is something over and above the physical. Chalmers distinguishes conceivability as “cannot be ruled out a priori” from “can be positively imagined”, accepting the case for zombies on both. Replies: deny premise 1 (the scenarios are not really conceivable — “type-A” materialists like Dennett); or deny premise 2 (conceivability is not a reliable guide to possibility, since a posteriori necessities such as Hesperus is not identical to Phosphorus or “water is not H₂O” are conceivable yet impossible). Chalmers’ defence of premise 2: terms for experience differ from “water” — “pain” has the same primary and secondary intension (it picks out a feel, not a hidden essence that might be present un-felt) — so the zombie scenario cannot be an a posteriori necessity in disguise; Swinburne, Goff, and Kripke take other routes to the same conclusion, and opponents retort with demonstrative-style analyses of phenomenal terms or with the possibility of “strong necessities”. ¹

The Argument from Personal Identity

From Reid (1785) onward it has been argued that the identity of persons over time is not a matter of convention or degree the way the identity of other complex substances is — showing that the self is a different kind of entity from any physical body; criticism from Hume to Parfit (1970; 1984) has left an inconclusive clash of intuitions over diachronic identity. A related argument concerns counterfactuals of origin (Madell 1981): for material objects, “is it the same object?” questions eventually admit no further fact — overlap of constitution is all there is, and identity “can be decided in any convenient fashion” — but for consciousness, no such overlap applies: “Any present state of consciousness that I can imagine either is or is not mine. There is no question of degree here.” An “85% the same psyche” idea makes no sense the way an 85% the same body does, and neither does the “no fact of the matter” answer look right — the twin-zygote case suggests Jones is not wrong to think there is a fact about which half would have been him. If so, the mind must be simple; since the body is highly complex, it seems to follow that the mind is immaterial. ¹

The Aristotelian Argument in Modern Form

Aristotle’s worry was that a material organ could not have the range and flexibility of human thought — matter cramping the range of objects the intellect could accommodate; parallel modern concerns centre on the range of rational processes matter would permit. Some are technical: Gödel believed his theorem showed demonstrably rational mathematical thought of which humans are capable but which no mechanical or formal system could exhibit, and Penrose argues similarly from the halting problem. Four less technical pressures: (a) the revival of cognitive phenomenology — thoughts of any kind are conscious in more than a behavioural-functional sense, and “what you are thinking” is ultimately accessible only privately, like “what it is like” to experience; (b) anything purely physical operates by physical laws on physical properties — a “syntactic engine” (Dennett 1987) — leaving meaningful communication and understanding unaccounted for; (c) the frame problem — a “mechanical mind” can only follow instructions and cannot see relevance that was not strictly encoded, so it lacks “common sense”; (d) Benacerraf’s problem — numbers and concepts seem to be abstract objects, yet physical brains operate with them: how does a physical brain interact with an abstract entity? A dualist about intellect has no such puzzle, since the immaterial intellect is precisely the sort of thing that can grasp abstracta. John Searle’s Chinese Room presses (b)–(c) for classical symbol-manipulating machines (→ chinese-room-argument); Ross and Feser press indeterminacy of conceptual content — nothing material can have exact, unambiguous content (quaddition vs addition) — and Fodor (2000) conceded computationalism fits only sub-personal processing; connectionist “deep learning”, its power notwithstanding, is data-hungry and shallow in transfer (Marcus 2018). The dualist sums up: as a thinker you are as fundamentally a semantically driven engine as you are a sensorily consciously driven one. ¹

The Argument from Predicate Dualism

If the irreducible special sciences are not wholly objective but depend on interest-relative perspectives — “hurricane” is a kind of thing only for creatures concerned about the weather — then their irreducibility presupposes minds that have those perspectives; and psychology, the science of the mental, is itself one of the least reducible special sciences, so its subject matter presupposes a mind to see matter as psychological: a vicious circle or regress. Full-blown reduction is the standard escape — understanding everything “from the bottom up” — but psychology is among the least likely sciences to be reduced; and if psychology cannot be reduced, this line of reasoning “leads to real emergence for mental acts and hence to a real dualism for the properties those acts instantiate” (Robinson 2003) — a predicate-dualism route to genuine property dualism, with a naturalistic complexion (see emergence). ¹

From Property Dualism to Substance Dualism

Against the received preference for property over substance dualism, one style of argument presses that the mind is a substance in the sense of a unitary entity — not a Buddhist or Humean bundle. Hume’s bundle theory (“when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other…”) famously left even Hume dissatisfied — the Appendix of the Treatise records two principles he could not render consistent. Foster and others hold that introspection reveals not merely being in mental conditions but being a certain sort of thing (“subjectness”); Lowe (1996) argues that psychological modes are essentially modes of persons — the identity of any psychological mode turns on the identity of the person who possesses it — so persons can be conceived of as substances. Modern bundle theorists (Parfit; Dainton) replace Hume’s “theatre” with a primitive co-consciousness relation binding the elements, abandoning Hume’s second principle; a standing objection is the “lone pain” intuition — there could not be a mind consisting of a single pain or a detached red after-image — which pushes mental contents toward being modes of a subject. ¹

Problems for Dualism

By far the most influential objection to dualism is the problem of interaction (see § Interactionism above). Two further facets worry critics: the queerness of the mental if conceived as non-physical, and the difficulty of accounting for the unity of the mind. (Important challenges left aside here include providing a dualist account of embodiment, and explaining when immaterial minds arise in the gestation of organisms and in the evolution of species.) ¹

The Queerness of the Mental

Physical objects are in principle equally accessible to anyone — from the right location we could all see the tree, and though none of us observes an electron directly, everyone can detect it in the same ways with instruments — but the possessor of mental states has a privileged access no one else can share. That is why there is a widely recognised “problem of other minds” but no comparably established “problem of my own mind”, suggesting to some that minds are not ordinary occupants of physical space. Mental states also possess the mysterious property of intentionality — being about other things, including nonexistents like Zeus; no mere physical thing could literally be “about” something else. In Ryle’s deliberately abusive phrase, the mind as the dualist conceives of it is a “ghost in a machine”, and considerations of this kind motivate many philosophers to avoid dualism if possible. The rejoinder: the contrast may hold only on a Newtonian, common-sense view of matter — if matter is essentially an abstruse mathematical structure, the sensible content within the experiencing mind may be the only concrete intelligible content we can devise, and the world inside the mind may be no more — or even less — queer than the world outside it. ¹

The Unity of the Mind

Whether one takes the mind to be a substance or just a bundle of properties, the same challenge arises: explain the nature of the unity of the mind — for the Cartesian, what kind of thing an immaterial substance is such that its presence explains unified experience; for the Humean, what relation binds the bundle’s elements into one thing. (Hume declared himself “wholly mystified”; his modern heirs (Parfit; Dainton) postulate a primitive co-consciousness relation.) Bundle dualism faces the objection that its elements could then exist alone — a lone pain, a detached red after-image — which most philosophers regard as absurd; hence mental contents are better thought of as modes of a subject. William James’s “pulse of thought”, each present Thought appropriating its predecessors, attempts to do the unifying work without a subject, with arguably moot success. Substance dualism has three families of answer: the “ectoplasm” account (immaterial substance as a kind of stuff — but then why does this stuff, any more than ordinary matter, support unified consciousness, and in what sense is it immaterial?); the “consciousness” account (consciousness itself is the substance — Descartes — with the cost that the subject cannot exist while unconscious, generating four options: continuous subconscious existence; intermittent existence (Swinburne); a series of substances (pushing toward bundle-style constructivism); or a special relation to time (Robinson)); and the “no-analysis” account (Foster: it is a mistake to ask what the immaterial self is “made of” at all — Descartes only half escaped the ectoplasmic model). ¹

Relationship to This Wiki

• emergence — The naturalistic cousin: classical emergentism (cd-broad, samuel-alexander) posited mind as a novel emergent quality, and the predicate-dualism argument above lands in “real emergence” — genuine property dualism with a physicalist starting point
• chinese-room-argument — The modern Aristotelian argument recruits Searle’s case against the “syntactic engine”; john-searle himself rejects both substance dualism and functionalism
• psychophysical-harmony — Dualism plus causal completeness is one of the argument’s key contrasting scenarios, and its authors argue the harmony claim survives dropping dualist assumptions
• jaegwon-kim — Property dualist of the 2005 vintage (with Jackson and Chalmers); his causal-exclusion argument bears on whether novel mental properties can do causal work
• paul-humphreys, p-w-anderson, michael-polanyi — Contemporary emergence accounts constructed without reverting to Cartesian dualism (fusion; hierarchical levels)
• gottfried-wilhelm-leibniz — Pre-established harmony: the classic parallelist alternative to Cartesian interactionism
• david-hume — The bundle theory of the self and its problems, as discussed above
• aristotle — Hylomorphism: the soul as the form of the body
• richard-swinburne, alvin-plantinga — Prominent contemporary defenders of substance dualism in analytic philosophy of religion

References

• Robinson, H. & Weir, R. (2025). “Dualism.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (first published 2003; substantive revision 17 Oct 2025). ¹

Footnotes

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