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Article History

Received: 15 January 2019

Revised: 7 June 2019

Accepted: 27 June 2019

First Online: 31 July 2019

Change Date: 26 May 2025

Change Type: Update

Change Details: Springer Nature’s version of this paper was updated to set the following texts as a quote: "two important truths on this subject have been discovered since M. Descartes’ day. The first is that the quantity of absolute force which is in fact conserved is different from the quantity of movement, as I have demonstrated elsewhere. The second discovery is that the same direction is still conserved in all bodies together that are assumed as interacting, in whatever way they come into collision. If this rule had been known to M. Descartes, he would have taken the direction of bodies to be as independent of the soul as their force; and I believe that that would have led direct [sic] to the Hypothesis of Pre-established Harmony, whither these same rules have led me. For apart from the fact that the physical influence of one of these substances on the other is inexplicable, I recognized that without a complete derangement of the laws of Nature the soul could not act physically upon the body (Leibniz 1985, p. 156).", "the conditional: If the law of the conservation of energy holds, then a perpetuum mobile (of the “first kind”) is thereby logically excluded. But, of course, the energy law has only empirical validity and might some day be refuted by cogent empirical evidence (Feigl 1958, p. 472)." and "[m]odern substance dualist philosophers continue to argue that their views are compatible with neuroscience, and I think that part of the reason is that they pay careful attention only to neuropsychology, largely ignoring the strong mechanistic implications of the other branches of neuroscience. When evidence from the whole breadth of neuroscience is taken together, it constitutes a truly formidable challenge to substance dualism. In my opinion the only kind of substance dualism that is still even remotely defendable in the light of modern neuroscience is a limited one, invoking a separate soul acting on the brain only for very particular aspects of our humanity such as free will (e.g. the philosopher Robert Kane) (Clarke 2009).".