Keith Ward: In Defence of the Soul

Oneworld, 1998 (1992)     Amazon.co.uk

Back Cover:

Is there such a thing as the human soul?

Are we tiny cogs in a vast cosmos, or do we have special value?

In the modern scientific age, questions such as these become more and more difficult to answer. In this book, Keith Ward presents a balanced, strongly argued and convincing case for the existence of the human soul in the context of scientific discovery.

Drawing on a range of disciplines and writers, from Nietzsche, through Darwin, Freud and Marx, to contemporary philosophers and scientists, Ward’s study of the key protagonists in the debate on the soul is authoritative and comprehensive. Covering such thorny issues as individual freedom, morality, the role of religion and the limits of scientific investigation, In Defence of the Soul builds rational bridges between apparent contradictions to shed light on an area we would all like to understand more fully.

Keith Ward

JOB’s Comment:

Many of my comments on Ward’s arguments against materialism as set forth in his book The God Conclusion apply to this defence of the soul too. I am inclined to question in important respects, or rather in important areas, the claim accepted by Ward that science is a worldview, and to put forward a more basic argument against the position that the cosmos could be of such a kind as has cogs and in which we are among those cogs. Both positions seem to me to be chimeras, of a closely related kind. But Ward’s argument is important in the major part of the debate on the issues of spirit and matter etc. in which it is accepted, as basic assumptions, that science is a worldview and that it is possible that the universe is a coggy one. And much of it can be retained with only minor conceptual modifications and adjustments in a defence of the soul from a position that does not accept these assumptions.