A Divine Alternative to Zimmerman’s Emergent Dualism

Abstract

Dean Zimmerman argues for the existence of souls as they enable us to avoid certain vagueness-inspired, metaphysical puzzles that plague materialist accounts of the person. There are far too many overlapping material thinking candidates for being the referent of “I”. Zimmerman suggests that an emergent soul whose creation is overdetermined by overlapping material entities will avoid the unwelcome overpopulation of physical thinkers. I will argue that parallel problems plague Zimmerman’s emergent dualism, there are too many souls produced where we want just one.

Keywords

• Emergentism, Zimmerman, Soul, Fission, Fusion