Publications
BOOKS
The Substance of Consciousness
In The Substance of Consciousness: A Comprehensive Defense of Contemporary Substance Dualism, two philosophers deliver a unique and powerful defense of contemporary substance dualism, which makes the claim that the human person is an embodied fundamental, immaterial, and unifying substance. Multidisciplinary in scope, the book explores areas of philosophy, cognitive science, neuroscience, and the sociology of mind-body beliefs.
The authors present the most comprehensive, up-to-date, and rigorous non-edited work on substance dualism in the field, as well as a detailed history of how property and substance dualism have been presented and evaluated over the last 150 years. Alongside developing new and updated positive arguments for substance dualism, they also discuss key metaphysical notions and distinctions that inform the examination of substance dualism and its alternatives.
The Conscious Mind Unified
The Failure of Physicalism and the Reality of the Bodily Soul
The first book-length argument for the reality of the human soul from the philosophy and neuroscience of the unity of consciousness.
Consciousness research is at an impasse. The hard problem of consciousness—explaining the existence of consciousness from non-conscious reality—and the binding and unity problems—explaining how unified consciousness arises from the parts of a system—remain as difficult to solve as ever. In The Conscious Mind Unified, Brandon Rickabaugh reveals the source of these problems as the assumption that subjects of consciousness are comprised of distinct parts, such as the brain, the body, or computational neural networks.
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Through examining the philosophy and neuroscience of consciousness, and computer science, Rickabaugh reveals the inability of the major naturalist perspectives—physicalism, panpsychism, and emergentism—to explain the subject of phenomenally unified consciousness. Rickabaugh offers an alternative path: the most viable route is the paradigm of contemporary substance dualism, where conscious entities are deeply integrated immaterial substances or bodily souls, transcending conventional brain, body, and neural network boundaries.
Forthcoming
2025
What is Consciousness?
An Introduction to Minds, Brains, Machines, and Souls
The fundamental nature of conscious beings is the most crucial issue of the twenty-first century. Yet, there is little work on the nature of consciousness and subjects of consciousness from a robustly informed Christian perspective. What is Consciousness? offers an introduction to the philosophy of mind from a contemporary analytic and analytic phenomenological perspective that takes core Christian ideas and doctrines seriously.
While all leading introductions to the philosophy of mind ignore or fail to take seriously the significant contemporary work defending traditional Christian views (e.g., substance dualism and hylomorphism), this text gives these views their due attention.
Each chapter addresses the most significant primary readings for each subject, including research in neuroscience, psychology, and computer science.
