The Return of the Soul:Brandon Rickabaugh and J.P. Moreland and The Substance of Consciousness

Israel Centeno

Brandon Rickabaugh and J.P. Moreland have written a book that is both a refined rebuttal and a meticulous provocation. The Substance of Consciousness is not merely another defense of substance dualism; it is a contemporary rearticulation of an intuition that has long been buried—not refuted—under the weight of philosophical, ideological, and scientific prejudice. The thesis is clear: consciousness resists reduction, and the self, as the subject of experience, cannot be dissolved into brain functions or physical correlates without betraying the very nature of experience itself.

From the opening pages, the reader is confronted with striking admissions. Notable materialists, like William Lycan, openly confess the insufficiency of the arguments for materialism. Russellian monists like José Gusmão Rodrigues lament the anti-dualist assumptions rampant in philosophical literature. Figures like Chalmers and Searle suggest that the rejection of dualism has more to do with fear than with reason—a fear of sounding religious, a fear of reviving Descartes, a fear of the soul. In this sense, the book is not merely arguing with theories, but with a cultural atmosphere that has pathologized certain questions. Why do we reject dualism? Is it conviction, or is it philosophical habit?

Rickabaugh and Moreland do not fall back on easy arguments. They do not rescue dualism with nostalgia or mere appeals to intuition. Instead, they engage with precision, blending analytic philosophy, the history of metaphysics, cognitive science, and philosophical theology. By reminding us that dualism is not exclusive to theism—as shown by atheists like Popper, Huemer, and Fales—the authors dismantle the assumption that every defense of the soul is religious propaganda. At the same time, they demonstrate how theism provides a richer and more coherent framework for understanding what consciousness reveals about reality.

One of the book’s most notable contributions is its critique of the disappearance of the “self” from 20th-century analytic philosophy. As philosophers grew obsessed with mental states, functions, and qualia, they lost sight of the subject who experiences them. Rickabaugh and Moreland recover the self—not as a vague construct, but as the ontological center of consciousness. They do so with philosophical rigor and without surrendering to scientism or metaphysical panic. The self returns, and with it, the mystery of the human.

In an era where physicalism struggles to resolve the hard problem of consciousness—and theories like panpsychism and Russellian monism gain traction—the authors make their stance clear. This is not a syncretic compromise; it is a radical recovery. There are substances, and among them, at least one that thinks. The soul is not an illusion, not an epiphenomenon. It is the very condition of possibility for experience.

Far from being an outdated apology, The Substance of Consciousness is a philosophical manifesto for our time. It dares. It refuses to flatter intellectual trends. And it reminds us that some truths, though denied, remain—waiting to be thought again, with courage.