7 papers in the library · publishing 2010
The Waning of Materialism March 25, 2010 Adam Pautz
AbstractThis chapter argues for primitivism about sensory consciousness. On primitivism, sensory consciousness cannot be fully reductively explained in physical or functional terms. The chapter's arguement for primitivism is not based on the usual a priori considerations, for instance the knowledge argument, the explanatory gap, or the thesis of revelation. Instead, the argument is based on a...
The Waning of Materialism March 25, 2010 Uwe Meixner
AbstractThis chapter offers a version of Cartesian dualism that draws on the resources of a Husserlian account of intentionality. For example, it argues that ‘I can locate myself at the point in space from which I am looking at the world (my ‘center of perspective’)’. It relies on empirical phenomenology to show that this location that does not correspond to my body or any part of it. Phantom...
The Waning of Materialism March 25, 2010 William Hasker
AbstractWe have a conception of the human person as constituted in part by a self, a unified, coherent center of consciousness which is a rational agent, capable of being responsive, and responsible, to other agents. There are, however, empirical phenomena — in particular, commissurotomy and multiple personality syndrome — that seem to threaten this unity both theoretically and practically. As...
The Waning of Materialism March 25, 2010 George Bealer
AbstractThis chapter targets functionalism as the most cogent form of contemporary materialism. In particular, it takes aim at ‘ontic’ or reductive functionalism: a theory that attempts to specify the essences of mental states, in a non-circular fashion, by means of physicalistic functional definitions (i.e., by means of the Ramsification of causal theories of the mind). The chapter points out...
The Waning of Materialism March 25, 2010 Laurence BonJour
AbstractThis chapter argues that there are no compelling arguments in favor of, and very powerful, seemingly unanswerable objections to, materialism in the philosophy of mind. The arguments for materialism that appeal to (a) the ‘principle’ of causal closure and (b) the doctrine of naturalism are argued to rest entirely on undefended assumptions. The central objection that materialist views...
The Waning of Materialism March 25, 2010 Bernard W. Kobes
AbstractDualist themes in Burge's philosophy of mind are gathered and articulated. Burge's anti-individualism yields an argument against token-identity theory; his reflections on mental causation have a dualist flavor; and he doubts that the relation of mental events to neural events is one of composition or constitution. This chapter argues that compositional materialism about representational...
The Waning of Materialism March 25, 2010 Terry Horgan
AbstractThis chapter formulates and motivates the current favored articulation of the metaphysical doctrine of materialism. It describes an alternative metaphysical position called minimal emergentism, which has two versions; and then contrasts it with stronger kinds of emergentism. Minimal emergentism posits certain inter-level necessitation relations — either nomically necessary connections,...