DanielCC wrote:

What reason would we have to think this though? Surely the point of immateriality arguments is to show that its possible for the mind to exist without the body.

In De anima​ Aristotle argues that the intellect has no bodily organ but (most interpreters think) also claims that the human intellect is not separable from the body (he seems to think this follows from the fact that the soul is the actuality of a body that has life). I don't think such knowledge would have to be pointless. It might be worth acquiring just in its own right. It would give one a more determinate sense of man's place among the living. It might give some content to the thought that man is godlike.

Aquinas presents the same argument that the intellect has no bodily organ and tries to extend it to an argument for separability. He summarizes its conclusion and continues:

Therefore the intellectual principle which we call the mind or the intellect has an operation per se apart from the body. Now only that which subsists can have an operation "per se." For nothing can operate but what is actual: for which reason we do not say that heat imparts heat, but that what is hot gives heat. We must conclude, therefore, that the human soul, which is called the intellect or the mind, is something incorporeal and subsistent. (I q. 75 a. 2c)​

There's something to the argument, but I think that it also raises questions as to whether Aquinas is being sufficiently resolute in his Aristotelian conception of cognition and the soul. And I think that is the source of Anscombe's caution in philosophizing about the soul.

 

Miguel wrote:

I always found Ryle's critique to be somewhat exaggerated and motivated by the same materialistic prejudice one finds rampant in contemporary philosophy of mind. It's a mentality that has led philosophers to posit one failed model after another. And I find it a little weird how some Christians would go along with it, albeit in a more reserved manner (Anscombe, Geach and Braine all come to mind. And I admire them nonetheless, just disagree on that).

I think it's wrong to read Anscombe and Geach as basically following Ryle, albeit reservedly, since there's really no materialistic prejudice in Wittgenstein, who was their actual influence. (Wittgenstein's interlocutor in the Investigations and other works usually expresses views which remind one more of Descartes and the British empiricists, as well as Frege and Russell, rather than contemporary physicalists. But there are places also where he applies parallel arguments to what look like physicalists. I think he's most plausibly read as thinking that Cartesian 'urges' about the nature of the mind are very basic and much more compelling and plausible than the materialist hopes.) I think they rather saw in Wittgenstein a powerful way to show what it is for an intellect to be essentially embodied. On topic after topic, Wittgenstein argues that meaning, understanding, perception, thought, etc. cannot be understood and explained by some event, describable in terms other than those of meaning, understanding, perception, thought, etc., the occurrence of which suffices for meaning, understanding, thought, etc. His issue specifically is with mechanistic explanations of the mind, where a mechanism is understood as something with two descriptions, one functional and one structural, the second of which can be used to explain the first. (Materialism is clearly one sort of view which tries to understand the mind as such a mechanism. But setting aside whether existing dualisms try to do so as well, it's clear that a theory could posit an immaterial substance to fit such a role also.) There is no process occurring at the time of thinking which guarantees that it is thinking:

That is to say: the whole enterprise is a mistake, of finding some other events which are to carry a thought at a particular moment. A dualist may say at this point: 'Right! So you see there is the immaterial event, which proves the immaterial substance or medium in which this immaterial event takes place.'

To this we may reply: 'Just on this sort of occasion, when the other events are few or none? Surely the immaterial nature of thought is there, even when there is a full-blown material occurrence to identify as the occurrence of a thought.' I mean, for example, when there is a pursuit of ends by intelligent handling of things in the light of scientific knowledge or thorough practical acquaintance. Or when there is the manipulation of signs in rapid calculation on paper. And in these cases there is no reason to believe that this immateriality of thought involves the occurrence of an immaterial event in an immaterial medium. ...

The immateriality of the soul consists at bottom in the fact that you cannot specify a material character or configuration which is equivalent to truth. ("Analytic Philosophy and the Spirituality of Man," in Human Life, Action and Ethics, p. 15)

I think it's totally correct that immaterial thought can be embodied in calculation on paper, or in what we call "thinking aloud," or in practical activity generally, without all of the content of those activities needing to be built into some separate process which explains the intelligence of those activities. (Besides getting the 'phenomenology' wrong [I apologize to John West for using this word], the view that there needs to be such a process standing behind thought etc. faces other problems, for instance concerning self-knowledge.) I think this indeed shows a 'resolute' way of taking seriously the view that the soul is the formal cause of what we do intelligently.

There are 'risks' undertaken in flying too close to the sun. Anscombe can't accept Wittgenstein's entire conception of philosophy, and indeed, in characterizing this sort of thing as the immaterial character of thought, she is already saying what he would not.