Historical and Traditional Dualisms
Dualism is the oldest and most ubiquitous theory of consciousness in the sense that nonphysical aspects of the world and mind, such as animism and ancestor worship, had long seemed the default assumption of millennia of pre-modern human groups and cultures.
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Peter van Inwagen
Philosopher
Peter van Inwagen is an American analytic philosopher and a leading figure in contemporary metaphysics, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of action. He is the John Cardinal O'Hara Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and research professor at Duke University.
Key Takeaways
Core Idea
Dualism is humanity’s oldest view of mind, rooted in spiritual and cultural traditions.
Cultural Roots
Animism, ancestor worship, and ancient philosophical systems assumed nonphysical mind or soul.
Religious Shaping
Abrahamic faiths, despite varied scripture, reinforced belief in immortal souls beyond death.
Philosophical Detail
Historical theology often treated the soul as unified, continuous, and divinely created.
Enduring Appeal
These deep traditions still shape global belief, even as science challenges dualist assumptions.
Historical and Traditional Dualisms
Dualism is the oldest and most ubiquitous theory of consciousness in the sense that nonphysical aspects of the world and mind, such as animism and ancestor worship, had long seemed the default assumption of millennia of pre-modern human groups and cultures. Plato's description of immortal souls in ancient Greece, where the person was entirely immaterial, and the profound ruminations about consciousness in ancient India, debating individual and cosmic varieties, were consistent with common intuitions and thus readily accepted.
On the other hand, biblical accounts of the nature of the person, especially in the Hebrew scriptures, stress human physicality and mortality, with no obvious assertions about immortal souls (Van Inwagen, 1995). In Genesis, humans became (were not inherently) “a living soul” (Gen. 2:7). Ezekiel writes, “The soul that sinneth, it shall die” (Ezek. 18:20). Paul, in the New Testament, has “the wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:23).
Granted, theologians can interpret “death,” as, say, a soul that is separated from God. But the Psalmist is clear, saying of humans, “His breath goeth forth, he returneth to his earth; in that very day his thoughts perish” (Ps. 146:4). And Solomon is unambiguous, “the dead know nothing” (Eccles. 9:5).
Nonetheless, the overwhelming majority of adherents to the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, along with most of their religious teachers, assume that human beings are, in essence, a soul and that the soul has some kind of future beyond death.
John Leslie describes the historical understanding of souls as “existentially unified,” noting, "When the parts of a soul were viewed as existentially unified at each particular instant, it wasn't thought that God, when manufacturing unified souls, had to do some kind of special mixing involving many separate steps. It was believed simply that souls had, from the moment of their creation by God, the property of being complex yet existentially unified. Many distinguishable elements of such complexity were present when a soul had a thought or an experience, but still, a soul remained existentially unified at each instant and remained the very same soul at successive instants" (Leslie, 2006).
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