More Than Matter? Is There More to Life Than Molecules? (review)

More than Matter? is essentially a book about the nature of human persons (207) but is not as focused in its attention as that theme might suggest. The book is written by a humanist (7), from a philosophical point of view and in light of the presiding assumption that “human persons are not accidental mistakes in a pointless perambulation of fundamental particles” and “[who] are [therefore] a window into the inner reality, value, and purpose of the cosmos” (8). This allows Ward to touch upon a wide range of related philosophical issues and humanist concerns, although it also seems to preclude an openness of mind. Nevertheless, the essential point Ward wishes to get across to the reader is that “there is no more important question in the whole of philosophy and in the whole of life than that of what a person really is” (63).

Although Ward claims not to reject scientific discoveries about the character of human nature and existence, his project here is not a neutral account of persons; he is convinced that humans cannot be accounted for simply in terms of “molecules in motion.” Rather, he writes, human persons are “continuing centres of consciousness and responsible moral agency” (63), and what is needed in being able to account for them as such, he maintains, is providing what he calls “ontological backing” that permits a clear distinction between their agency and inanimate matter. Thus he proposes in this volume, as he puts it, a “philosophical idealism as the most adequate, consistent, and plausible metaphysical view of reality [since it] carries with it a theory of human persons as experientially unique, morally free, and fully embodied subjects of experience and action, living in an interpersonal world of similar beings—a community of social and self-realizing conscious agents” (182). Aspects of this view find some elaboration in chapter 5 in an argument for the priority of the mental over the physical in opposition to the views of his teacher Gilbert Ryle, and in chapter 6 where he insists that despite the argument for the priority of mind over matter, human minds do not inhabit a separate mental universe. These points are important for his later argument in support of “dual-aspect idealism” developed in chapter 7 in which he shows not only the possibility of the existence of minds independent of matter but also that matter is not simply an illusion but has its own kind of reality, despite ultimately being dependent upon mind (102).

Support for such a philosophical idealism, claims Ward, requires rational clarity “about what is really real” (21), and in the first four chapters of the book he reviews eight different philosophical systems on what the ultimate building blocks of the universe are. Not surprisingly, he concludes that long discussion with the suggestion that idealism provides the soundest account of what’s really real and then proceeds to a critique of the reductive materialism that denies a radical distinction between mind and matter. Having had Gilbert Ryle as a teacher in his Oxford days, Ward sees his task in this regard as requiring a dismantling of Ryle’s critique of Descartes in his The Concept of Mind (1949). This he does in chapter 8 and supports his conclusions in chapters 9 and 10 by way of critical assessments of recent scientific views of the relationship of between mind and brain, in which he argues that minds are more than just functional properties of brains and bodies (116) and cannot be explained simply in terms of physical laws (145).

In chapters 12 and 13 Ward further explores “what it is about the inner lives of human persons that gives them unique moral value” (155), and in chapter 14 elaborates on the philosophical and scientific implications of “the idealist view of life.” In his concluding chapter, Ward argues that even though his whole project here is a philosophical one, it would be foolish to overlook the...