ARGUMENTS (1) 243simply ceasing to cause them to exist. Jainism embraces the former,
more radical, dualism on which it is impossible that a soul cease to exist;
Christianity, insofar as it accepts dualism, holds to the less radical
version.
Property dualism versus substance dualism
Jain dualism is one version of mind–body dualism. Insofar as religious
traditions are dualistic concerning mind and body, they tend to a dualism of
substances, not merely a dualism of properties. Property dualism
concerning mental and physical properties holds that being a mental
property defines one kind of property and being a physical property
defines another kind of property, and it is logically impossible that any
property belong to both kinds. A property Q is a mental property if and
only if X has Q entails X is self-conscious. Not every non-mental property
is a physical property; being prime is not a physical property, nor is having
only consistent properties. Without pretense of precision, let us refer to
such properties as “abstract properties” and then suggest that property Q
is a physical property, if and only if Q is neither mental nor abstract.
There are more concrete definitions of being a physical property; for
example, one can say that Q is a physical property if and only if X has Q
entails X is spatially located or X is a property referred to by some
predicative term used in some contemporary theory in natural science or
some similar successor. But the more concrete examples raise problems; it
is not clear that there is any univocal sense in which both chairs and
elementary particles are “spatially located” and “similar” in “similar
successor” means “physicalistic” (or something less clear).^4
Philosophical timidity will, in the current academic climate, suggest to
even the most convinced property dualist, of which there are many, that
they should not go further and embrace substance dualism. A substance
dualist concerning mind and body holds that not only are being mental and
being physical definitive of different kinds of properties, but each is a kind-
defining property relative to a sort of substance – being mental constitutes
one kind or essence and being physical constitutes another kind or essence,
it being logically impossible that any one substance belong to both kinds.
Something is a substance if and only if it has properties, is not itself merely
a bundle of properties, and (if it is temporal) can remain the same over time
and through change of non-essential properties. For a substance dualist,
persons are mental substances. Typically, human beings are persons
embodied in genetically homo sapiens bodies.