Richard Dawkins (1941)
Dawkins is often cited as a key materialist thinker.
Although on analysis, his approach is much more subtle than crude reductionism.
• Dawkins rejects any notion of the disembodied soul espoused by Plato and Descartes and many religious believers.
He finds no empirical evidence for such an entity and mocks religious believers for supporting such a bizarre
notion.
• For Dawkins, the only conceivable theory is that of evolution. We are as we are because of our genetic make up,
not the efforts of our soul to guide us towards the realm of the forms; each change is due to evolution. There is no
soul which continues, there is only the survival of DNA, the function of life.
• Despite this, Dawkins acknowledges the mystery of consciousness but he has faith that it should be possible for
scientific enquiry into DNA eventually to explain the phenomenon. But he does say that this will be difficult as the
phenomenon of consciousness (imagination, art etc.) are so various and do not always have obvious evolutionary
value.
• Dawkins makes a distinction between what he calls SOUL 1 and SOUL 2.
• SOUL 1 is the separate substance of much traditional thought, a real separate thing that is spiritual and contains
personality. Dawkins rejects this.
• SOUL 2 refers to ‘intellectual or spiritual power. High development of the mental faculties. Deep feeling, imagination
and sensitivity.’ Dawkins argues that this is a meaningful way of describing ourselves provided we are clear that this
does not refer to a separate thing. This is rooted in the body but is yet to be scientifically explained.
B. F. Skinner (1904-1990)
“The position can be stated as follows: what is felt or introspectively observed is
not some nonphysical world of consciousness, mind, or mental life but the
observer's own body. This does not mean, as I shall show later, that introspection
is a kind of physiological research, nor does it mean (and this is the heart of the
argument) that what are felt or introspectively observed are the causes of
behaviour. An organism behaves as it does because of its current structure, but
most of this is out of reach of introspection. At the moment we must content
ourselves, as the methodological behaviourist insists, with a person's genetic and
environmental histories. What are introspectively observed are certain collateral
products of those histories…”
(B. F. Skinner: About Behaviourism (1974) p. 18)