The incarnation and unity of consciousness

The doctrine of the Incarnation says that a divine person (the Son) assumes a human nature and so becomes human. The chapter follows the so—called abstractist (as opposed to concretist) line. According to this, the human nature the Son assumes does not consist of a distinct created human substance or mental subject or anything very much like that. Rather, the human nature is a property or immanent universal or trope or some such, and for the Son to become human is for the Son to come to have such a property. Assuming such an account of the incarnation, Thomas Morris and Richard Swinburne (and others) have developed a two—minds or divided mind version, which says that the Son has a distinctively divine mental life and, distinct or divided from this, a distinctively human mental life. Recently, however, many (e.g. Timothy Bayne and David Chalmers) have argued or at least strongly suggested that a single mental subject or person must have phenomenal unity of consciousness. The chapter attempts to accommodate this claim and develop different versions of the two—minds or divided mind view of the Incarnation that don't say the Son has phenomenal disunity, but rather some other kind of disunity: e.g. introspective disunity.

Consciousness · Epistemology · Incarnation · Theology · Classical Philosophy and Thought · Medieval and Classical Philosophy · Philosophy · Psychology

• Recent developments in analytic Christology

  Open Access•James M Arcadi•Philosophy Compass•2018

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