The Flying and the Masked Man, One More Time : Comments on Peter Adamson and Fedor Benevich, ‘The Thought Experimental Method : Avicenna’s Flying Man Argument’

Abstract

This is a critical comment on Adamson and Benevich 2018, published in issue 4/2 of the J-APA. I raise two closely related objections. The first concerns the objective of the flying man: instead of the question of what the soul is, I argue that it is designed to answer the question of whether the soul exists independently of the body. The second objection concerns the expected result of the argument: instead of knowledge about the quiddity of soul, I claim it yields knowledge about the soul’s existence independently of the body. After the objections, I turn to the masked man fallacy, claiming that although the Adamson-Benevich interpretation does save the argument from the fallacy, this comes at the cost of plausibility. I then give a more modest interpretation that both avoids the fallacy and is plausible. The paper concludes with a remark about the metaphysical possibility of the flying man.