ABSTRACT. Swinburne holds that the whole history of the world can be told with our familiar system of categories: substances, properties, and times. Talk about places is reducible to talk about substances and their relation to other substances. Swinburne understands by a substance a particular concrete object. Substances exist all-at-once and totally, and may have other substances as parts; they have properties (they have properties or exist for periods of time). A property may be a monadic property of one substance, or a relation between two or more substances. Properties are universals: they could be possessed by different substances from the ones by which they are possessed. Of the properties which a substance has, some are essential properties of that substance. Some of the properties of a substance are contingent properties of that substance. Swinburne counts any universal characteristic picked out by a predicate as a property. It is a pure a priori matter whether one property is identical with another, and whether one kind of property supervenes on another kind of property. pp. 240–245

Keywords: Swinburne; mind; brain; free will; substance

How to cite: Lazaroiu, George (2015), “Is It Metaphysically Possible That We Could Exist without a Brain?: Swinburne on Free Will and the Brain,” American Journal of Medical Research 2(2): 240–245.

Received 8 May 2015 • Received in revised form 10 October 2015
Accepted 12 October 2015 • Available online 24 October 2015